Qlay is a San Francisco-based AI hiring company that sources, vets, and shortlists remote engineering talent - notably from Vietnam and Africa - and pairs it with an AI Proctor that catches AI-assisted cheating during interviews and coding tests. Using eye-gaze tracking, speech analysis, a phone-as-second-camera setup, and process monitoring, Qlay aims to make technical hiring both fast (shortlists in about a week) and trustworthy in an era when candidates can quietly lean on tools like ChatGPT.
Tom Nakata (Tomofumi Nakata) is the co-founder and CEO of Qlay, a San Francisco AI startup he built after stints at McKinsey, J.P. Morgan, and Disney and a Harvard statistics degree. Qlay began as a generative-AI consumer-sentiment engine and pivoted into AI-powered interview proctoring - eye-gaze tracking, speech-cadence analysis, and multi-camera monitoring that catches AI-assisted cheating in remote technical interviews. Raised across Singapore, Tokyo, and California, Nakata describes his team as 'a shark that never stops,' chasing authenticity and measurable impact while sourcing engineering talent across Africa, Vietnam, and beyond.