Your AI Recruiter: Our Series A Investment in ConverzAI
The AI revolution has entered its second act. The first act established the art of the possible: breakthrough advancements in foundational models that allowed AI to understand and generate human-like text, code, images, and voice. The second act establishes what is practical. AI agents are being deployed to take over an increasing number of use cases, and we believe the next era of value creation will come from companies that turn these capabilities into practical business solutions.
We have always believed this transformation would be especially powerful in verticals where human conversation and relationship-building have historically been barriers to scale. As outlined in our 7 Golden Rules for AI Applications, the greatest opportunities for AI lie in turning services into software across the 80% of the economy that remains largely untouched by technology. The $100 billion-plus staffing market is a prime example of this.
Today, staffing agencies are inundated with high volumes of applicants across a variety of roles, employers, and industries. Recruiters screen resumes, schedule appointments, conduct interviews, evaluate and score candidates, write up assessments, and place candidates in roles (or, if the candidate does not qualify, refer them to other roles)—all as quickly as possible. It’s no surprise that many recruiters are left fatigued and unable to properly process high quantities of applicants. Employers, on the other hand, are left with open positions for longer periods, ill-fitting placements, and are out several (hundreds of) thousands of dollars in staffing expenses. With most staffing agencies compensated on successful placements, agencies are racing to fill roles with high-quality candidates, and they simply can’t keep up.
Meet Your AI Recruiter
ConverzAI accelerates staffing agencies’ time-to-fill by automating the entire staffing process, from source to placement, with their AI recruiter. The recruiter engages with high volumes of applicants, goes through in-depth candidate screenings, and creates detailed candidate reports to help managers make faster decisions while improving staffing agencies’ internal data sets. Importantly, agencies who leverage ConverzAI gain a competitive advantage against agencies looking to fill the same position.
ConverzAI takes the traditional staffing industry and turns its economics on its head. Rather than needing to increase the headcount of staffers linearly with the demand for placements, ConverzAI enables a single AI recruiter to engage with hundreds of thousands of candidates simultaneously. Costs become marginal relative to compounding improvements in outputs. In the end, ConverzAI’s AI agent enables agencies to achieve a once impossible trifecta: lower cost-per-placements, faster time-to-fill, and higher-quality placements.
We’re thrilled to partner with Ashwarya Poddar and the ConverzAI team as they redefine the modern staffing industry. Prior to founding ConverzAI, Ashwarya had spent over a decade at Microsoft building state-of-the-art customer insights tooling, including conversational intelligence models and predictive lead scoring. Ashwarya recognized an opportunity for AI to do more than just assist recruiters—to be the recruiter itself. We believe Ashwarya’s bold vision exemplifies the AI-native companies that will define AI’s second act.
At Menlo Ventures, we’re ALL IN on AI. If you’re building AI applications that transform industries, we’d love to hear from you.
