Babblebots pivoted from interview coaching to AI recruiters doing the hiring

Babblebots builds AI recruiters — digital agents that screen CVs, conduct video and phone interviews, and score and schedule candidates for HR teams.

$1.2M from Anchorage Capital Partners, BonBillo, Z21 Ventures, Ahead VC and angels (as of November 2024)

Engineer Roli Gupta, who had earlier founded solar startup Oorjan Cleantech and left it in 2019 after concluding solar was 'more about financing and branding, and less about technology', joined edtech Toppr to build its sales hiring vertical. The pandemic gave her time to attack the problem she kept hitting: hiring was broken. She spoke with more than 40 senior professionals across countries, and began building proof of concept in 2021, incorporating in the US first.

The first iteration was a B2C upskilling platform — cohort-based classes in early 2021 to help candidates improve interview skills. By Q4 2021 the epiphany arrived: 'Instead of offering it for interview preparation, why not sell it to companies to solve their hiring problems?' Upseckill products were one-time purchases with low lifetime value; enterprise recruitment was a recurring, global, big-ticket market. Babblebots relaunched as a B2B platform in 2022 and launched publicly in March 2023, with three engineers building the product through trials with a few customers.

By November 2024 the platform had conducted 40,000-plus interviews across 200-plus roles, claimed an ARR of INR 1.2 crore with 2x quarterly revenue growth, and was raising about $3M to push into the US market.

The pivot reversed the customer, not the technology: an interview-practice bot became the interviewer, because employers pay recurring and candidates pay once.

Founder-market fit was direct — Gupta had lived the hiring problem building a sales organisation at Toppr after leaving solar.

The hard-won details (interruption handling, accent variation, explained ratings) are what make an AI interviewer usable in enterprise hiring.

When your users are one-time graduates, sell the outcome to whoever repeats: the interview-practice tool became an interviewer, moving the same tech from candidates to employers.

As of November 2024, Babblebots claimed INR 1.2 crore ARR with 2x quarterly revenue growth, was pre-revenue in the US, and planned to spend 30-40% of its next raise on US-market product development, plus GDPR compliance and integrations with assessment companies.