apriora
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Aaron Wang
Aaron Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Alex (formerly Apriora), a San Francisco AI company whose autonomous recruiter, also named Alex, runs thousands of phone and video interviews a day for Fortune 100s, Big Four accounting firms, and staffing agencies. A Brown triple major who went from a quant trading desk and Facebook AI Research to a Y Combinator startup, Wang bet that a 10-minute conversation reveals more than any LinkedIn profile, then bought the alex.com domain for more than $500K to prove it. The company raised a $17M Series A led by Peak XV Partners in September 2025.
The CEO who spent $500,000 on a first name
Aaron Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Alex (alex.com), the AI recruiter that runs autonomous phone screens and video interviews at scale. He started the company as Apriora in 2023 with John Rytel, then paid more than half a million dollars for the alex.com domain and renamed both the product and the company after its AI agent. A Brown University graduate in computer science, applied math, and economics, Wang previously worked at Facebook AI Research and as a quantitative analyst at a hedge fund. Alex conducts thousands of interviews a day for Fortune 100 firms, banks, restaurant chains, and Big 4 accounting firms, and has raised roughly $20 million, including a $17 million Series A led by Peak XV Partners.
He Taught a Machine to Sit Across the Table From You
John Rytel is the co-founder and CTO of Alex (formerly Apriora), a San Francisco startup that builds an agentic AI recruiter which conducts live, real-time video interviews with job candidates. A Brown University graduate in computer science and applied mathematics, Rytel teamed up with Aaron Wang to launch the company in 2023, went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, and has helped raise roughly $20M from Peak XV Partners and 1984 Ventures. He is the builder behind the engine: the person who writes the code that lets an AI named Alex interview thousands of people at once.