Tezi raised $9M to let an AI agent run hiring end to end, not just rank resumes

Tezi builds an AI agent for hiring managers: candidate screening, interview scheduling and candidate outreach in one workflow.

That LLM reasoning plus natural language can automate the whole recruiting workflow — screening, scheduling, outreach — where past ML only ranked resumes.

$9M seed led by 8VC and Audacious Ventures, with Liquid 2, Afore, PrimeSet, South Park Commons and industry angels.

Tezi launched at the beginning of 2024, founded by CEO Raghavendra Prabhu and COO Jason James, who saw that new-generation LLMs made end-to-end recruiting automation possible for the first time.

The company trained its models on 250 million licensed profiles and tunes OpenAI and Anthropic models to hiring. On bias, the founders are blunt: they cannot stop biased inputs from employers, so they avoid training on historic hiring patterns and match on skills and criteria the hiring manager sets, protecting against adding algorithmic bias of their own. Humans stay engaged for now; full automation is the hope as models improve.

Existing tools stop at ranking a thousand applications; a human still handles every email and calendar invite.

The founders argue reasoning plus natural language — not better classifiers — is what changes the category.

Training avoids historic hiring patterns to limit amplifying bias, matching on stated skills instead.

The $9M seed and 15-20 design customers bought the runway to a generally available product.

Automate the workflow, not just the judgment: the defensible step past a century of resume-ranking software is owning the scheduling and outreach nobody wanted to do.

As of the report, Tezi was in alpha with a handful of design customers and planned a wider beta distribution later in 2024 on the way to general availability.