Apriora

We’re excited to announce our partnership with Bullhorn, one of the leading staffing softwares for recruiting agencies. With this developer partnership, Bullhorn customers can now access Alex, our autonomous interviewer, directly in their systems. - Alex builds an interview based per job in Bullhorn - Alex schedules screens with candidates as they apply or enter the system - Alex screens every candidate over a call - Alex writes up interview feedback notes directly into the candidate’s profile and in custom fields - Alex enriches candidate profiles and job data for next-level searching and matching and so much more. Bullhorn customers are some of the most innovate in the staffing industry, and we’re excited to offer them the state-of-the-art in autonomous intelligence and voice AI.

I got my startup job because of an AI Interview... While talking with a few startups in SF, I got a DM from Aaron Wang, asking if I'd be open to interview for a founding sales role… I agreed, and he told me that their product, an AI recruiter named Alex, would conduct my first-round interview. My thoughts were something like this: "Oh boy, an AI recruiter…this will be rough... but glad they're at least willing to dogfood their product. Not so common these days." I snagged some time on Alex's calendar. As soon as I got on the video call, I was impressed. Alex's voice was relaxing. I could see our conversation transcribed. She was asking in-depth and personal follow-up questions. Alex took me off guard… This morning, I rewatched my interview. Five minutes into our conversation, she was two follow-up questions deep, asking about my negotiation process to close a deal at my last startup. I was shocked. I walked out of my office and was a bit stunned. My wife asked me how it went, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond. I remarked, "A LOT better than I thought." Aaron: After the first round with Alex, I met several times with Aaron, and I became more impressed with the product, the growth, and Aaron himself. Aaron has the tenacious spirit of his parents, who were doctors in China and sacrificed their credentials to start over in the U.S. Aaron moves fast and is focused. He shared his passion for helping the job market become more efficient for candidates and employers. I caught the vision. John: I met with John Rytel, Aaron's cofounder, and got the sense that he was an incredible engineer who focused on building for the customer. It's been several months since joining the Apriora team, and we're moving FAST - adding Alex to the teams of numerous staffing firms and recruiting teams. -- I attached a ~6-minute YouTube video in the comments if you want to check out Alex, our AI Recruiter, interview Aaron in the company's early days.

In his first 10 days with the company, Carson closed his first 5-figure B2B deal. Before joining Apriora, he: 🙌 Led GTM at his first Y Combinator-backed AI startup 📣 Led as student body president at his college's business school of 3k students ⛳️ Played competitive golf and met Obama when playing in Hawaii At the start of his recruiting process, Carson had a screening call with Alex, our autonomous AI recruiter, who asked screening questions like work authorization and location preference before digging into his sales experience and GTM knowledge. Their conversation lasted about 10 minutes and he scored within the top 5 of the over 500 candidates that applied. We are incredibly pumped to welcome Carson Stroyan to the Apriora team!

Edgar Baudry stood out among the over 1,000 candidates we interviewed. At 14, he taught himself English after moving to the US from France. At 15, he built a neural network from scratch in C# for self-driving cars. At 19, he became the youngest employee at Activision Blizzard, working on computer vision and their backend infrastructure. Alex, our AI recruiter, chatted with him for 15 minutes about his background and experience, and recommended him within the top 0.5% of candidates that interviewed. I'm incredibly excited to welcome Edgar to the Apriora team!

Allen Recruitment Consulting, an international staffing firm with over 25 years of experience and offices in 7 countries, has conducted thousands of interviews with Alex, their AI recruiter who expertly qualifies across their open positions. Read more about it in our blog post: https://lnkd.in/eNCvgdSE

Big news from Apriora! We've raised $2.8M to accelerate our mission to supercharge how recruiting teams identify the best talent faster with an AI interviewing experience that candidates love. What does this mean for our customers and partners? We’ll use this investment to: 🚀 Empower our customers to leverage real-time conversational AI in the hiring process 🛠️ Continue building world class AI-powered hiring software ❤️ Grow our talented team to expand our ability to serve more customers Thank you to our customers, investors, and partners for making this raise possible. We’re excited to continue serving our customers and growing with your support. Read the full announcement here: https://lnkd.in/eKydYXAb The round is led by 1984 Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, HOF Capital, Pioneer Fund, and several angel investors. A special thank you to our incredible team, including my co-founder John Rytel and founding engineer Dru Still, for their incredible work in furthering our mission.

🚨 Forbes just published a phenomenal piece covering what Apriora is doing to widen the talent aperture for employers and recruiting agencies powered by conversational AI. 📰 Read it here: https://lnkd.in/ep-UYBYq 🚀 Interested in learning more about how an AI interviewer can help your company or agency make faster, data-driven hiring decisions? Book a demo at apriora.ai/contact to see Apriora in action! 👏 Thanks to Jack Kelly for the great reporting!

Check us out in Times Square! 🗽 We'll be featured through Sunday on the 4th minute of every hour. If you spot the billboard in-person, DM us a picture and we'll send you some custom swag. 😎 (And if you prefer the West Coast, we're hiring SWEs and SDRs for our SF office: https://lnkd.in/evqS39uA) Thanks to our friends at Brex for setting this up #GrowWithBrex

We just invested in Apriora: a fascinating startup out of Y Combinator that's completely rethinking recruiting using AI. They've built really interesting tech and are growing explosively out of the gate. 👷♂️ 👩🏭 👩⚕️ If you're a full stack engineer who is interested in complex engineering problems and reshaping a giant, but stodgy industry, send me a DM. JD below

Apriora (YC W24) is building the best interviewer to conduct interactive job interviews in real time with AI. Hiring is slow and expensive. Existing video interviewing platforms were built to solve this for companies, but their one-way interfaces and cookie-cutter questions create a disappointing candidate experience, resulting in low completion rates and a limited hiring signal. Founded by Aaron W. and John Rytel, Apriora's AI interviewer conducts real-time video interviews with candidates, including technical screens, phone screens, system design, coding, behavioral, and more. Today, companies using Apriora reduce recruiting overhead, interview more candidates, and make better hiring decisions, while their candidates benefit from an equitable and interactive interviewing experience. Congrats Aaron and John on the launch!