Aaron WangCo-Founder & CEO, Alex (alex.com)

Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Alex, the San Francisco company he started in 2023 with John Rytel under the harder-to-pronounce name Apriora. The product was an autonomous AI recruiter: it reaches out to candidates, schedules interviews, and screens them by voice and video, automating more than 80 percent of the early hiring funnel. The agent was always called Alex. The company caught up to its own software later.

The Operator01A quant who quit guessing

Before recruiting software, Wang trained as a builder of models — in two different senses. He studied computer science, applied mathematics, and economics at Brown University, then went to work at Facebook AI Research and as a quantitative analyst at a hedge fund. Both are jobs where a tiny edge in prediction is worth a great deal of money, and where a resume is treated as what it is: a marketing document a candidate wrote about themselves.

He brought that instinct to hiring, an industry that still runs on PDFs and gut feeling. His thesis fits in a sentence, and he repeats it: a short live conversation reveals more signal than a polished profile ever will. Alex is the machine built to have that conversation a thousand times before lunch.

The Bet02Half a million dollars for five letters

For more than thirty years, alex.com belonged to a man named Alex. When he finally decided to sell, Wang bought the domain for over half a million dollars and renamed the entire company after the bot. It was not an obvious move, and he had to argue for it — to his co-founders, and to investors who had funded a company called something else.

His defense was a number. The moment the new name went live, the word-of-mouth and inbound pipeline jumped, and it jumped in a way you could put on a chart. People remembered “Alex.” They did not remember “Apriora.” A first name turned out to be the cheapest sales rep on the payroll.

The Product03The recruiter that never sleeps

Alex fills roles across the whole spectrum — from senior software engineers to baristas — for Fortune 100 companies, financial institutions, nationwide restaurant chains, and Big 4 accounting firms. The names stay confidential; the volume does not. The agent handles the initial screen: confirming availability, checking salary expectations, running background questions, and conducting the kind of structured first interview that a human recruiter does forty times a week and grows numb doing.

The pitch to recruiters is not that the robots take the jobs. It is that they take the toil. Let Alex run the thousand screening calls, the argument goes, so a human can spend real time with the handful of people actually worth meeting — and advise the hiring managers who used to wait days for a callback.

The Money04From seed to Series A

The company raised a $3 million seed round led by 1984 Ventures, then a $17 million Series A led by Peak XV Partners, with Y Combinator, Uncorrelated Ventures, and a roster of Fortune 500 chief HR officers joining in. That puts roughly $20 million behind the idea that the first job interview should not require a human on both ends of the line — and that the human is better spent on the second one.