Katherine Allen

Katherine Allen runs a company that most people outside the legal industry have never heard of, and that a growing share of the biggest law firms in America now cannot recruit without. Her company, Flo Recruit, is a software platform built for one job that used to run on spreadsheets, paper feedback forms and guesswork: hiring lawyers. From its base in Austin, Texas, Flo now handles sourcing, scheduling, interviewing, applicant tracking and, more recently, performance management for a client list that includes close to 70% of the AmLaw 100 and more than 100 law schools serving over 25,000 students.

Allen is the co-founder and CEO. Her pitch to law firms is blunt. Recruiting, she argues, has quietly become one of the least structured, most expensive parts of running a firm, and most firms cannot see their own hiring clearly enough to fix it. "Flo Recruit clients are making strategic decisions based on real-time insight," she has said. "Others are making expensive guesses because they can't access their own data fast enough." The company's growth is the argument that she is onto something.

A project before it was a company

Flo Recruit did not begin as a grand plan to reinvent legal hiring. It began as a side project. Allen started building an early version as a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, working at first with two of her sorority sisters. She was a Plan II Honors student, in one of the university's most selective interdisciplinary programs, and by her own account she caught the entrepreneurship bug on campus rather than arriving with it.

The turning point was a co-founder. Atreya Misra, a UT electrical and computer engineering graduate student, had no entrepreneurial ambitions of his own. A friend dragged him to a startup pitch night sponsored by a local software company. Allen, who was working the same scene, later asked him to help build her product as a software developer. He said yes. That partnership, formed almost by accident, became the engineering half of the company.

By 2019 the project had outgrown school. Allen and Misra were accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2019 batch, the accelerator that has seeded companies like Airbnb, Stripe and DoorDash. Allen left UT Austin to run Flo full time. The university, for its part, later gave her the John S. Butler Distinguished Student award, recognizing her campus contributions through the Genesis program and Flo Recruit even as she walked away from the degree.

The two-sided bet

Plenty of companies sell recruiting software to employers. Fewer try to sit on both sides of a hiring market at once. That is the structural bet at the center of Flo. The company works with law firms that are hiring and with the law school career services offices that place students. Because it partners with both, Flo can see the flow of legal talent from campus into firms in a way that a firm-only tool cannot.

That design is also Allen's answer to a shifting market. For decades, elite legal hiring ran on a predictable ritual: on-campus interviews, a handful of target schools, and recruiting agencies filling the gaps. As firms have broadened where and how they source, that structure has frayed. Allen frames Flo as the system of record for the new, messier reality. "Market shifts have pushed firms to adopt less structured, more diverse recruiting tactics," she has said, arguing that firms now need software that keeps up with channels beyond the traditional campus program.

After Y Combinator, Allen and Misra did something a little unfashionable for YC alumni: they went back to Austin instead of staying in the Bay Area, and built the team there. Flo has grown into a company of dozens of employees on Burnet Road, and Allen has kept a tight circle of early investors around the business through each round.

From seed to Series A

The money followed the traction. Flo raised a $1 million seed round out of Y Combinator in 2019, backed by names including Dorm Room Fund and LiveOak Venture Partners. In August 2023 it closed an oversubscribed $4.2 million seed round led by LiveOak and Moneta Ventures, with the capital pointed at deeper reporting and integrations. In May 2025 the company announced a Series A, again led by LiveOak and Moneta, with participation from The LegalTech Fund, Y Combinator and Teamworthy Ventures, to expand its offerings for both law schools and law firms across entry-level, lateral and partner hiring.

What the funding buys is scope. Flo started with tools for the interview itself, then expanded outward across the hiring funnel, and has since pushed past hiring into performance management, letting firms connect who they recruit with how those hires develop over time. Allen's ambition is to make Flo the connective layer for the entire legal talent market rather than a single-purpose tool.

It is a specific kind of company to run. Vertical SaaS, aimed at a conservative industry, built in Texas, sold to institutions that do not change their processes lightly. Allen's public comments keep returning to the same themes: clients, data, and the patience to solve one real problem after another. On the "Crushing It" podcast, she and Misra talked candidly about the parts of startup life that founders usually leave out of the press releases, including funding pressure and mental health. It is a rare note of plain honesty from someone otherwise focused on the metrics.