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.
Outship is a San Francisco technical-screening startup from Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch that evaluates software engineers by how they work with AI coding agents rather than by whiteboard puzzles. Candidates complete real coding tasks inside a cloud VM with a browser-based VS Code and agents like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, while Outship records every prompt, edit, command, and decision and scores the session against customizable rubrics. Founded by ex-Berkeley AI researchers Saner Cakir (CEO) and Kayla Lee (COO), the company argues that shipping code is now the baseline and that the real signal is how a person steers an agent, makes tradeoffs, and recovers when things break.
Fetcher is a New York-based AI recruiting platform that automates the top of the hiring funnel - finding, verifying, and reaching out to qualified candidates so talent acquisition teams can spend their time interviewing instead of searching. It pairs machine learning against a database of roughly 500 million professional profiles with human sourcers who quality-check every batch, then delivers vetted candidates and automated, personalized outreach directly into recruiters' inboxes and applicant tracking systems.
Visage is a candidate sourcing platform that pairs a global crowdsourcing community of thousands of expert sourcers with AI to deliver pre-screened, qualified passive candidates directly into an employer's applicant tracking system. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in San Francisco, it serves large enterprise recruiting teams at companies like IBM, Siemens and Nielsen, aiming to cut the time and cost of filling hard-to-fill and high-volume roles.
SquarePeg is an AI-native recruiting platform that acts as an intelligence layer on top of a company's existing applicant tracking system. It enriches, evaluates, and scores candidates - explaining every match - so lean recruiting teams can screen unlimited applicants, rediscover past candidates, source passively from 500M+ profiles, and filter out fraudulent applications without swapping out their tools. Founded by Claire McTaggart, the company raised a $3.5M seed round in early 2025 to build candidate-evaluation software for the modern recruiter.
Talent.com is a Montreal-born job search platform that aggregates tens of millions of job listings from career sites, staffing agencies and job boards into one searchable place. Originally launched in 2011 as Neuvoo, it rebranded to Talent.com in 2019, raised $120M US in Series B funding in 2022, and now operates across roughly 78 countries with AI-driven job matching, recruitment advertising for employers, and free tools like its widely used salary and tax calculators.
Alex is a San Francisco AI recruiting company whose voice and video agents conduct candidate interviews, screening, and scheduling at scale. Spun out of Y Combinator (W24, formerly Apriora), Alex automates the early, repetitive stages of hiring - phone screens, resume reviews, identity verification, and coordination - across video, phone, SMS, and WhatsApp in 26 languages. The platform has interviewed more than a million candidates for Fortune 100 companies, major banks, national restaurant chains, and Big 4 firms, cutting time-to-hire while letting human recruiters focus on relationships and final decisions.
TextUs is a Denver-based business texting platform that gives revenue and recruiting teams real, two-way SMS conversations at scale. It pairs each team with dedicated business phone numbers, a shared inbox, automated campaigns, keywords, and analytics, and plugs directly into CRMs and applicant tracking systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, Bullhorn, Greenhouse and Workday. The pitch is simple: text messages get read and answered while email and voicemail get ignored, so teams that text close, hire, and retain faster.