ai-talent-matching
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Michael Burdick Built a Marketplace for People Who Wanted the Ledger and Their Lives
After a childhood spent moving, a conventional start at Deloitte and a spell of freelancing at business school, Michael Burdick decided that finance professionals deserved more say in where their talent went. Paro became his ten-year experiment in making autonomy add up.
Contrario
Contrario is a San Francisco AI recruiting company that pairs specialized human recruiters with AI agents to source, screen, and deliver vetted candidates to startups within days. Founded in 2025 by Stanford dropouts Arya Marwaha and Aditya Sood, it operates as a hybrid between a traditional agency and recruiting software, using AI talent scorecards and graph-based matching while automating scheduling and follow-ups. The company reached roughly $6M in annualized revenue and paid over $1M to recruiters within six months of operating, and raised a $2.3M seed led by Nexus Venture Partners.
Gloat
Gloat is an enterprise HR-technology company that pioneered the internal talent marketplace: an AI platform that maps a company's people by their skills rather than their job titles, then matches them to internal roles, projects, gigs and mentorships. Founded in 2015 in Tel Aviv (originally as Workey) by Ben Reuveni, Amichai Schreiber and Danny Shteinberg, Gloat now runs on a proprietary Workforce Graph and has expanded into skills intelligence and agentic HR tools used by global enterprises such as Mastercard, Unilever, Novartis, Spotify and HSBC. It has raised roughly $190 million, including a $90M Series D led by Generation Investment Management.