It does not help you run the technical interview. It runs the technical interview - on your behalf, around the clock, the same way every time.
Somewhere right now, a senior engineer who should be shipping code is instead sitting in a video call, asking a stranger to reverse a linked list. Karat exists to make that meeting disappear.
Picture the modern technical interview. A nervous candidate. A reluctant interviewer pulled off a sprint. A whiteboard prompt half-remembered from a blog post. The whole thing is inconsistent, expensive, and faintly miserable for everyone in the frame. Karat looked at that scene and asked an unfashionable question: what if interviewing were not a chore companies muddled through, but a service somebody actually ran well?
So Karat became that somebody. The company conducts technical interviews on behalf of employers - not coaching, not software you bolt onto your own broken process, but the interview itself. A global network of vetted engineers, which Karat calls Interview Engineers, sits across the table (virtually) from your candidates. They use tested formats. They score against benchmarks. They hand back data. Your own engineers stay at their desks, building the thing you actually hired them to build.
The technical interview is the gate every software career passes through, and almost nobody guards it well. It is improvised. It varies wildly from one interviewer to the next. It leans on whoever happens to be free that afternoon, which means the bar moves depending on the day, the mood, and the coffee. For candidates it is a lottery. For companies it is a tax paid in their most expensive people's time.
Co-founder Mohit Bhende ran into this wall from the inside. As a Microsoft executive trying to scale engineering hiring for Xbox, he discovered that even one of the largest tech companies on earth could not interview with the volume, quality, and consistency it needed. If Microsoft could not brute-force its way through, the problem was not effort. It was structure.
Bhende teamed up with Jeffrey Spector, who arrived with an unusual resume for a hiring startup: he had been Chief of Staff to Melinda Gates at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, focused on how education translates into economic opportunity. The pairing tells you what kind of company Karat wanted to be. One founder had felt the operational pain. The other cared about who gets through the gate at all.
Their wager, placed in 2014, was that interviewing could be standardized without being dehumanized - that a structured, repeatable process run by real engineers would be both fairer and more predictive than the improvised status quo. Fairness and rigor are usually sold as a tradeoff. Karat bet they were the same product.
Karat calls its platform the Interviewing Cloud, and the name is doing real work. The idea is that interviewing should behave like infrastructure - dependable, on demand, the same every time you call it. Three pieces make it run.
A worldwide network of vetted senior engineers who conduct the interviews, applying consistent, tested formats instead of improvised prompts.
Enterprise-grade tooling that runs structured technical interviews live, 24/7, across time zones and candidate schedules.
Benchmarked scoring and pipeline analytics that turn each interview into a defensible, comparable hiring signal.
Launched Dec 2025: a human-led, AI-enabled format where candidates tackle multi-file projects with an AI assistant beside an Interview Engineer.
The result is that a company can route candidates to Karat and get back consistent, structured interviews at whatever volume it needs, whenever it needs them - without pulling a single one of its own engineers off the roadmap.
Vision is cheap; renewal checks are not. The fastest-growing and largest enterprises - Roblox, American Express, Intuit, Pinterest, Indeed, Compass, Wayfair, Duolingo - hand their technical interviewing to Karat. At the 2021 Series C, the average enterprise client had doubled its contract size year over year, and eight companies were each spending more than $1M a year. Bookings tripled; the customer base doubled. People do not quietly triple their spend on something that does not work.
There is a second proof, and it is the one Karat seems proudest of. The Brilliant Black Minds program offers free mock technical interviews and coaching to Black software engineers, and its community has passed 10,000 members. Karat's own research found that three mock interviews make a candidate six times more likely to get hired. When the gatekeeper decides to widen the gate, the numbers move.
Strip away the enterprise language and Karat is arguing something specific: that interviewing is too consequential to leave to improvisation. It decides who gets the job, which decides who gets the career, which over time decides who gets to build the software everyone else lives inside. Run that process sloppily and you do not just lose efficiency. You lose people who would have been good, and never find out.
Karat's answer is to treat the interview as a craft with standards, run by people who do it full time, measured well enough to be fair. That is the through-line connecting the unicorn valuation and the free coaching program. Both are the same idea pointed in two directions: make the gate work, and make more people able to walk through it.
The ground is moving fast. Per Karat's 2025-2026 report, frontier AI models are advancing from autocomplete to agents that refactor entire libraries, and the company estimates the return on a strong engineer could triple over the next three years. Yet most companies still ban AI in interviews and have not updated how they assess talent. The gap between how engineers will work and how they are being tested is widening - and that gap is, conveniently, exactly the thing Karat sells a fix for.
Return to that opening scene: the reluctant interviewer, the nervous candidate, the half-remembered prompt. Karat's whole pitch is that this meeting does not have to exist in that form. The engineer stays on the roadmap. The candidate gets a consistent, fairer shot, at a time that suits them, scored against a real benchmark. The interview still happens - it is simply run by people whose only job is to run it well. That is the scene Karat is trying to retire, one structured interview at a time.