Juicebox<\/a>, an AI-powered search engine that uses natural language to analyze professional profiles, personal websites, and other publicly available information to identify the most qualified candidates.<\/p>\nAfter attending startup accelerator Y Combinator in the summer of 2022, Paffenholz and Gupta spent a couple more years refining their product. When their AI search engine, PeopleGPT, was ready in late 2023, it was quickly adopted by a wide range of customers, from small startups to large companies like Cognition, Ramp, and Perplexity.<\/p>\n
In a short period of time, it was serving over 2,500 customers and achieving more than $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).<\/p>\n
On Thursday, Juicebox announced that it had raised $36 million in total funding, including a $30 million Series A round led by Sequoia.<\/p>\n
Sequoia partner David Cahn learned about the company while catching up with an early-stage startup founder who said that he is using Juicebox for all of his recruiting efforts. Cahn told TechCrunch that the founder has hired over a dozen people without using a professional recruiter, something that was previously very difficult to do.<\/p>\n
Such a rave review of Juicebox piqued Cahn\u2019s interest. Shortly after, Cahn learned that Sequoia\u2019s internal recruiter was also trying Juicebox to help the firm with its own hiring efforts, which made him even more excited about the startup\u2019s growth potential. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Techcrunch event<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
When Cahn eventually met with Paffenholz and Gupta, he was even more impressed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve ever in my career seen a company with four people that got to 2,000 customers with that small of a team,\u201d Cahn told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n
Although Juicebox has since hired eight additional employees, the company continues to attract customers without a sales team.<\/p>\n
Customers are flocking to Juicebox in part because hiring speed is extremely important for companies racing to build AI functionalities.<\/p>\n
What sets Juicebox\u2019s search engine apart is its ability to infer information about candidates much like a human would.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe help find net new candidates that wouldn\u2019t be found elsewhere, because the profiles might not have the keywords or the types of things that we\u2019d expect them to have in the regular searches,\u201d Paffenholz told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n
The startup\u2019s product is popular not only with small companies that lack a dedicated recruiter, but also with talent teams at large corporations. By automating the candidate search, the tool frees up internal recruiters to focus more on building relationships with potential hires.<\/p>\n
Once Juicebox identifies candidates, its agent can automatically email them and schedule initial calls.<\/p>\n
While Juicebox is growing quickly, older talent acquisition startups like Eightfold<\/a> are also adding AI-powered search functionality to their offerings.<\/p>\nStill, Cahn is convinced that Paffenholz and Gupta can transform Juicebox into an essential product for every startup\u2019s technology stack.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve invested in a number of businesses that become defaults for startups, like Stripe,\u201d he said. \u201cI think Juicebox has a chance to be a default where, every single startup, [it\u2019s] the first thing they use to hire their first employees.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For years, recruiters used machine learning to find potential hires by searching for keywords in r\u00e9sum\u00e9s and LinkedIn…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":163709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[84,4203,564,60448,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-163708","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-entrepreneurship","10":"tag-recruitment","11":"tag-sequoia-capital","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}