psychometrics
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The Résumé Is Becoming Fiction. Criteria Wants Hiring Managers to Read the Signals
AI can polish a résumé in seconds, but it cannot make the underlying candidate better at the job. Criteria is betting that structured tests, interviews and a trail of 6 billion data points can tell employers what the application no longer does.
Joe Schaeppi Is Teaching Machines to Ask a Better Question: Why?
Before Solsten could model an audience, its founder had to connect psychotherapy, powder days, Fortune 500 UX and one consequential cold email. The result is a career-long argument for looking past the click to the person making it.
Solsten Wants Marketers to Stop Guessing - and Start Measuring Why People Click
Solsten built its reputation helping game studios decode player motivation. Now it is selling that psychology layer to marketers and AI builders - with unusually concrete case studies, a much broader market, and a harder question about when prediction becomes persuasion.
The Company Betting You Should Take the Exam Whenever You Want
A veteran-founded North Carolina startup spent more than a decade arguing that the honest way to catch cheating is to stop making people schedule it. As bigger rivals merge and raise prices, ProctorFree is quietly picking up their customers.
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.
Claire McTaggart
Claire McTaggart is the founder and CEO of SquarePeg, an AI-powered recruiting platform that acts as an intelligence layer on top of applicant tracking systems - screening, sourcing, enriching and scoring candidates beyond the resume. A former Monitor Deloitte strategy consultant who ran campus recruiting, she left a partner-track career to attack a problem she had lived: the resume is a terrible predictor of fit. Starting with psychometric matching and evolving into an AI evaluation engine integrated with 95+ ATS platforms, SquarePeg raised a $3.5M seed round in February 2025 led by Next Frontier Capital, bringing total funding to roughly $6.4M.
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.
Workera
Workera is an AI-native skills intelligence platform that helps enterprises verify, benchmark, and develop AI skills across their workforce. Founded in 2020 by Kian Katanforoosh and Andrew Ng, the company uses science-backed adaptive assessments and an AI mentor (Sage) to close skills gaps at scale. With over 100 million skills verified across Fortune 500 clients including Accenture, Siemens Energy, and Samsung, Workera has grown 1,021% over three years and is backed by $47.3M in funding from investors including NEA, Jump Capital, Owl Ventures, and Accenture itself.
Kian Katanforoosh
Kian Katanforoosh is the CEO and co-founder of Workera, an AI-powered skills intelligence platform that has raised $55.5M and serves enterprise clients including Samsung, Siemens Energy, and the U.S. Air Force. Born in France to Iranian immigrant parents, he came to Silicon Valley via Stanford, where he co-created the Deep Learning Specialization on Coursera with Andrew Ng, reaching over 4 million learners. He holds Stanford's Walter J. Gores Award (the university's highest teaching honor) and was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 and World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer in 2025. His mission: make elite mentorship - the kind he received from Andrew Ng - accessible to anyone through AI-powered skill assessment and personalized learning.