ai-hiring
(7)
Joonko
Joonko was an Israeli-founded, AI-powered diversity recruiting platform that promised talent-acquisition teams automated access to pre-vetted candidates from underrepresented groups - women, people of color, and veterans. Founded in 2016 by Ilit Raz and named after Everest pioneer Junko Tabei, the company graduated from Techstars Atlanta and the Salesforce Incubator, and raised roughly $30 million from investors including Insight Partners, Target Global, Kapor Capital, and Vertex Ventures Israel. In 2023 the story collapsed: an investor confronted Raz over inconsistencies, she admitted to fabricating customer contracts, bank statements, revenue, and candidate counts, and she resigned. The SEC charged her in 2024 with a $21 million 'AI washing' securities fraud, and Joonko filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after shutting down and laying off all staff.
HackerRank
HackerRank is a technical skills platform that helps companies screen, interview, and hire developers based on what they can actually build rather than what their resume claims. Founded in 2009 by Vivek Ravisankar and Hari Karunanidhi, the company runs a two-sided model: a community where millions of developers practice coding challenges, and an enterprise product that lets 3,000+ companies - including a large share of the Fortune 100 - assess candidates with real-world coding tests, live pair-programming interviews, and, increasingly, AI-assisted evaluation and proctoring.
Gyfted
Gyfted is a Stanford-connected, remote-first HR-tech company that builds psychometric and cognitive assessments powered by behavioral science and AI. Its free consumer quizzes (Big Five, EQ, DISC, cognitive ability) draw millions of test-takers via organic search, while its B2B software helps founders, recruiters and team leaders screen candidates and hire for role and culture fit. Co-founded in 2020 by CEO Robert Kowalski with a team that includes Stanford GSB psychometrician Michal Kosinski as an adviser, Gyfted has raised roughly $1.3M in early funding.
Robert Kowalski
Robert Kowalski is the co-founder and CEO of Gyfted, a behavioral-science recruiting platform that matches people to jobs and teams on personality, culture fit and ability rather than CVs. A Stanford GSB MBA and LSE economist, he built Gyfted with Stanford computational psychologist Michal Kosinski and engineer Adam Szefer to make remote hiring faster and less biased. He signs his own title 'Village Idiot ie. CEO' and frames the entire recruiting industry as broken and worth flipping over.
Simba Jonga
Simba Jonga is the founder and CEO of Laborup, an AI-powered hiring platform often described as the LinkedIn of manufacturing. A University of Tennessee chemical engineer turned Stanford AI researcher, he built Laborup after watching skilled machinists, welders and technicians struggle to get hired despite working inside high-tech factories. The platform uses an autonomous AI voice agent to interview and vet workers, building profiles in minutes and matching them to high-paying industrial jobs. Laborup has raised $7.7M from investors including NVP, Torch Capital and angels Jeff Dean, Jeff Jordan and Evan Moore, grown a 25,000-strong East Tennessee worker network, and is expanding across the South and Midwest.
Amanda Richardson
Amanda Richardson is the CEO of CoderPad, the technical hiring platform used by Spotify, LinkedIn, Shopify, and Lyft to evaluate developer talent in 160+ countries. A Wall Street equities analyst turned Silicon Valley product leader, she built her career through Eclipsys, Snagajob, Prezi, and HotelTonight before taking the helm at CoderPad and driving 4x revenue growth, a landmark acquisition of French competitor CodinGame, and expansion to 4,000+ customers conducting over 3 million assessments annually.
Vikas Aditya
Vikas Aditya is the Chief Executive Officer of HackerEarth, an enterprise platform that has redefined how the world's largest companies find, assess, and hire technical talent. Appointed CEO in July 2024, Aditya brings decades of experience from Intel, Veridic Solutions, and his own startup QuikFynd to a company serving 500+ enterprise customers and a community of over 4 million developers globally. Under his leadership, HackerEarth launched OnScreen - an always-on AI interview tool using lifelike avatars - and is pushing the industry toward evaluating aptitude over syntax as AI reshapes software engineering.