The Man Who Turned Candidate Frustration Into a Half-Billion Dollar Company
The most overlooked problem in enterprise software is also the most personal. Every year, hundreds of millions of people apply for jobs. The vast majority hear nothing back, or get a form email, or chase a ghost. Anil Dharni noticed this - not as an abstract statistic, but as a design failure. He built Sense to fix it.
Most founders in recruiting tech start as HR professionals or engineers. Dharni's route was odder and, arguably, better. He trained as an aeronautical engineer, got an MBA from MIT Sloan, helped build hi5 into the world's third-largest social network, then co-founded two mobile gaming companies in rapid succession during the smartphone gold rush of 2009-2012. When GREE paid $210 million for his studio Funzio in an all-cash deal, he became exactly the kind of person who could have stopped working. He didn't.
Sense launched in 2016, co-founded with Alex Rosen, Ram Gudavalli, and Pankaj Jindal. Its premise was blunt: staffing agencies and enterprise employers had thousands of candidates in their databases who never heard back, were never re-engaged, and were never treated as people rather than rows in a spreadsheet. The contingent workforce - temp workers, contractors, shift-based employees - was the most invisible population of all. Sense built the platform to change that.
From Crime City to Candidate Experience
Dharni's pivot from gaming to HR tech looks surprising on paper but holds up under scrutiny. At hi5, he was thinking about how people build identities and connections inside digital products. At Funzio, he was thinking about engagement loops, notification design, and why tens of millions of people would open an app, interact with a system, and come back the next day. The skills that made Crime City addictive - clear feedback cycles, personalized moments, frictionless communication - are precisely the skills required to make candidate experience not terrible.
After the Funzio acquisition closed, Dharni served as SVP of Studio Operations at GREE, overseeing a large portfolio of studios and products. It was operational scale at a different order of magnitude. That experience - managing complexity across dozens of teams - built the muscle he'd need when Sense started closing enterprise accounts with Fortune 500 companies and large staffing networks that process millions of applications a year.
The business Dharni built at Sense is not just a chatbot layer on top of an ATS. It is a full-stack talent engagement platform: AI recruiting chatbot, text messaging, interview scheduling automation, talent CRM, referral management, candidate scoring, career sites, and - as of 2024 - conversational voice AI that handles outbound candidate calls autonomously. A recruiter at a healthcare staffing firm or a warehouse logistics company can run campaigns at scale and have every candidate feel like they received a personal response. That asymmetry - personal at scale - is the company's core thesis.
SoftBank Bets on the Contingent Workforce
In December 2021, Sense raised $50 million in a Series D led by SoftBank, placing the company's valuation at $500 million. It was, by any measure, a statement of confidence in a market that tends to get overlooked by Silicon Valley's obsession with white-collar knowledge work. The staffing and contingent workforce market is enormous - a multi-trillion dollar slice of global labor - and chronically underserved by technology. Dharni's pitch was specific: the workers who keep warehouses, hospitals, and logistics chains running deserve the same quality of communication as any other candidate.
Prior investors had already included Google Ventures and Accel. Total funding crossed $106 million across four rounds from more than a dozen investors. Each raise tracked with concrete metrics: more customers, more automation volume, more evidence that the product was doing something other than filling demo slots.
"Recruiters should be loved by the candidates they serve."- Anil Dharni, CEO & Co-Founder, Sense
Anthropic, Constitutional AI, and the Responsibility Question
As AI started showing up in every enterprise software pitch deck, Dharni made a choice that distinguishes Sense from most of its competitors: he partnered with Anthropic, the AI safety company, to build with Constitutional AI principles. The move is commercially interesting and philosophically deliberate. Recruiting AI that flags, screens, or scores candidates carries obvious risks - bias, opacity, unaccountable decisions. Dharni's alignment with Anthropic signals that Sense is building for a world where regulators and HR leaders both ask hard questions about how AI makes decisions, not just how fast it can send messages.
The voice AI product launched in 2024 represents the current frontier. Sense's conversational voice AI conducts outbound recruiting calls autonomously - screening candidates, asking questions, scheduling interviews - with a voice and conversational flow designed to feel natural rather than robotic. In industries like manufacturing, healthcare staffing, and logistics, where recruiters need to reach large candidate pools quickly, this represents a genuine operational shift. A recruiter who used to make 80 calls a day can now have Sense run thousands while they focus on the candidates worth deeper engagement.
The Mission Beneath the Product
Dharni talks about humanizing the contingent workforce in ways that feel less like marketing language and more like a founder fixation. In podcast appearances and industry interviews, he returns consistently to the experience of the candidate - the warehouse worker who applies for a job and never hears back, the nurse on an agency roster who doesn't know where they stand, the temp who feels interchangeable. The product is built to change the frequency and quality of communication at every stage of the candidate journey, not just the application phase.
By 2024, Sense had reached $75 million in annual revenue with over 400 enterprise customers and 1,000+ organizations on the platform. The company employs more than 380 people globally. Dharni remains on the building side of the story - still running the company he co-founded eight years ago, still framing the problem the same way he did at the start: recruiters should be the people candidates are glad they met.
Before the Spreadsheet, There Was the Blueprint
Dharni's degree in Aeronautical Engineering is the kind of detail that gets mentioned once and then glossed over. It shouldn't be. Engineers who design aircraft are trained to think about systems where failure has consequences - where you cannot ship a flawed product and patch it later, where every component must be accounted for and its failure modes understood. The discipline of that training shows up in how Sense approaches product reliability, integration depth (the platform connects with dozens of ATS systems via bi-directional integration), and the emphasis on measurable outcomes over feature counts.
The MIT Sloan MBA gave him the commercial vocabulary. Hi5 gave him consumer product instincts. Funzio gave him a $210 million proof of concept and a network of co-founders - including Ram Gudavalli, who went on to help build Sense. The entire career arc reads like a deliberate preparation for a company that would need to operate at consumer scale with enterprise reliability.
What Comes Next
The recruitment technology market is consolidating and changing fast. Every major HR software vendor is adding AI features. Sense's advantage, if it holds, comes from being built entirely around engagement and communication rather than bolted onto an existing system of record. The platform sits between candidate and employer at every touchpoint, which gives it data - and leverage - that older incumbents cannot easily replicate.
Dharni's public statements in 2024 pointed toward continued investment in voice AI, deeper analytics, and expansion of the omnichannel approach - connecting with candidates across SMS, WhatsApp, email, voice, and chat from a single platform. The vision is a complete candidate journey, managed by AI, that never makes a person feel like they fell through the cracks. Given that candidate experience remains one of the most common complaints in the labor market, the market size for getting it right is not small.