Juicebox raises $36 million to transform hiring with AI search
For years, recruiters relied on machine learning to sift through résumés and LinkedIn profiles, searching for keywords that might indicate a good fit. While this approach helped narrow candidate pools, hiring teams still had to manually review each profile—an often time-consuming process.
David Paffenholz and Ishan Gupta believed there was a better way. In 2021, at just 22 and 19 years old, they began building Juicebox, an AI-powered search engine designed to analyze professional profiles, personal websites, and other publicly available information. By leveraging large language models (LLMs), their tool goes beyond keyword matching, surfacing candidates who might otherwise be overlooked.
From Y Combinator to Rapid Growth
After completing Y Combinator’s summer 2022 program, the pair spent more than a year refining their technology. By late 2023, Juicebox launched PeopleGPT, a natural language search engine for recruiting that quickly gained traction. Within months, the platform had attracted over 2,500 customers ranging from early-stage startups to large enterprises like Cognition, Ramp, and Perplexity.
The momentum translated into impressive financial performance: more than $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) with a team of just four people.
$36M Funding Led by Sequoia
On Thursday, Juicebox announced that it had raised $36 million in total funding, including a $30 million Series A round led by Sequoia Capital.
Sequoia partner David Cahn discovered the company through a founder who had hired over a dozen employees using Juicebox without the help of professional recruiters—a rare feat. The endorsement caught his attention, and he soon learned that Sequoia’s own internal recruiting team had also been experimenting with the platform.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever in my career seen a company with four people that got to 2,000 customers with that small of a team,” Cahn told TechCrunch.
Juicebox has since expanded its headcount modestly, but it continues to grow without a dedicated sales force.
Why Companies Are Flocking to Juicebox
Speed is a crucial factor for companies racing to scale their AI teams, and Juicebox’s differentiator lies in its ability to infer information like a human recruiter would. Unlike keyword-driven searches, PeopleGPT identifies candidates who may not have obvious indicators in their résumés or LinkedIn profiles.
“We help find net new candidates that wouldn’t be found elsewhere, because the profiles might not have the keywords or the types of things that we’d expect them to have in the regular searches,” Paffenholz said.
Once candidates are identified, Juicebox can automatically email them and schedule introductory calls, streamlining the outreach process for internal teams.
The platform has proven equally valuable for small startups without recruiting staff and for large corporations with established talent teams. In both cases, recruiters can spend more time building relationships with prospective hires instead of manually combing through profiles.
Competing in a Crowded Market
Juicebox’s rise comes as other talent acquisition startups, such as Eightfold, are also adding AI-driven search features. But investors like Cahn believe Paffenholz and Gupta’s company could become indispensable to startups in the same way Stripe became the default for payments.
“We’ve invested in a number of businesses that become defaults for startups,” Cahn said. “I think Juicebox has a chance to be a default where, every single startup, [it’s] the first thing they use to hire their first employees.”
