HiringCafe Raises $6.8 Million, Launches AI Talent Agent

HiringCafe raised $6.8 million in pre seed funding led by Spark Capital, with Nonfiction Capital, Silicon Gardens and angel investors from ZipRecruiter and Indeed, the company said in its announcement. HiringCafe also launched an AI Talent Agent that lets users create agents to search jobs on their behalf, available at hiringcafe.com/ai-search.

HiringCafe indexes career pages directly rather than relying on aggregators or sponsored listings. The company says it lists more than 5 million jobs, up to 400 percent more than the most popular job boards, and that its platform has reached more than 2 million monthly active users without marketing spend.

The AI Talent Agent scans a live index the company describes as 5.7 million open roles, matches jobs to a user's uploaded resume, and filters out what the company calls ghost listings. HiringCafe says the agent is free for job seekers, with no paywall or subscription.

"We realized that the modern job hunt is fundamentally broken because legacy platforms operate on an advertising model, not a true search model," said Hamed Nilforoshan, co-founder of HiringCafe, in the announcement. "By using AI to index the entire long tail of the job market, we are finally bringing the other 80% of jobs out of the dark."

HiringCafe, described on its about page, was co-founded by Nilforoshan and Ali Mir, who began the project as a spreadsheet of startup job listings in 2022. Fraser Kelton, general partner at Spark Capital, said in the announcement that the company's growth, without marketing spend, reflected demand for a product focused on job seekers rather than employers.