Our investment in Tezi: The world's first autonomous recruiter

Recruiting amazing talent is one of the most strategically important functions for any company, and the total spend on recruiting services in the US is $150B+. Yet, since LinkedIn, why hasn’t there been a massive recruiting startup?

In looking at the recruiting software landscape for almost a decade, my conclusion to this question has been that ultimately in the recruiting world, buyers and users are willing to spend way more money on getting in front of and screening the right people vs. on process management. And rightly so. That’s the biggest problem in recruiting - finding amazing talent. Accordingly, if you look at the recruiting budget of any company, there’s 10x more spend on LinkedIn + third party agency recruiters (sourcing and screening) vs. software (interview process management).

Enter RVP and Jason with Tezi. When we first met RVP and Jason in November 2023, this was one of the points we all felt mutually excited about: the world of recruiting is finally ready for the next big software company because we now have software capabilities to start sourcing high-quality people. Imagine a world where as soon as you type in the detailed specs of the engineer or sales rep you’re looking for, an AI recruiter shows you a very qualified list of candidates with specific rationale on why those candidates might be a good fit. Then, as you provide feedback on each candidate, it continues to understand the heuristics you’re looking for and qualifies the list further. And then when you’re ready, it reaches out to the relevant candidates with a personalized email, screens applicants, and schedules them for you. That’s the world Tezi is ushering in! 

But as with any seed investment, ultimately it came down to our conviction and excitement about working with the two founders. RVP was previously the CTO of Thumbtack and Covariant, and prior to that, was the Head of Infrastructure at Pinterest. Jason was previously Head of Product & Design at Thumbtack and subsequently VP of Product for the core Instacart app. As we went from one conversation to another, it was very clear to us that these two were not just very sophisticated and nuanced in their thinking on product and company building, but also extremely ambitious and gritty and had a clear sense of urgency about them. Every reference we did on them came back glowing. 

So it was no surprise that even though they were not raising then, and we made a pre-emptive offer in the last two weeks of December, within days, they had multiple compelling term sheets in front of them! We finally signed the term sheet as co-leads alongside our friend, Bhaskar at 8VC, on Dec 23rd. Just goes to show – for the best founders, capital is available 365 days a year!We’re so excited to get to partner with RVP and Jason, as they build the world’s first fully autonomous recruiter. It’s early days, but we’ve been nothing short of impressed with the velocity with which RVP and Jason have been building. Here’s a sneak peek 😊:

Can't wait to see the Tezi story unfold in the days and years ahead!