Juicebox Raises $30M Series A Led by Sequoia to Transform AI Recruiting

Juicebox, an AI-native recruiting start up, has announced a significant new funding round that cements its position as one of the most promising players in the recruiting technology sector. The company revealed that it has now raised a total of $36 million in funding, led by a $30 million Series A from Sequoia Capital. Other existing investors, including Coatue, NFDG, Lux Capital, Y Combinator, and BOND, also participated in the round. This latest injection of capital comes at a time when the recruiting industry is under intense pressure to evolve, with companies racing to hire technical talent and grappling with the limitations of traditional search tools.

The Series A funding marks a major milestone for Juicebox, which had quietly raised a $6 million seed round prior to this announcement. The fresh funds are intended to support the company’s scaling efforts, including expanding its engineering team, improving the capabilities of its AI systems, building deeper integrations with applicant tracking systems, and refining its autonomous recruiting agent product. The company has already demonstrated strong commercial traction. It has crossed $10 million in annual recurring revenue and is being used by more than 2,500 customers, ranging from early-stage start ups to larger enterprises. Juicebox claims that its revenue has grown more than tenfold in the past year, powered by what it describes as thousands of searches conducted daily on its platform.

What sets Juicebox apart is its flagship product, PeopleGPT, an AI-powered recruiting search engine. Instead of relying on rigid keyword searches and Boolean strings, PeopleGPT allows recruiters to describe in natural language the kind of candidates they are seeking. The system then pulls from more than thirty data sources, including résumés, personal websites, open-source contributions, and other public signals, to identify individuals who may not surface in traditional searches. Beyond finding candidates, the platform assists in drafting outreach messages, scheduling calls, and exporting profiles into existing recruiting software systems, effectively automating much of the manual work associated with sourcing talent. As co-founder David Paffenholz explained in an interview, “You enter a description of who you’re searching for, and PeopleGPT will find best fit profiles across 30+ data sources, write personalized outreach, and export those candidates, including summaries, to your ATS or CRM.”

The company’s trajectory is particularly striking given the small size of its team. Sequoia partner David Cahn noted, “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.” This lean approach has not prevented rapid adoption. In fact, many of Juicebox’s customers have come through word-of-mouth and organic growth rather than traditional sales outreach, suggesting that the product’s usefulness has spoken for itself.

Juicebox was co-founded by David Paffenholz and Ishan Gupta, who were just 22 and 19 years old respectively when they began pursuing the idea of applying large language models to recruiting. Both immigrants, David from Germany and Ishan from India, they went through Y Combinator in 2022 and spent the following months refining their concept before launching PeopleGPT in late 2023. Their shared frustration with the inefficiency of existing recruiting tools, combined with their early conviction that language models could interpret intent in ways older systems could not, led them to build a platform designed to help recruiters uncover hidden talent. Sequoia, which has now become their most prominent backer, praised their persistence and expertise, writing that the two founders “spent years iterating and became deep experts in both talent workflows and LLMs.”

The company’s ambitions are bold. Juicebox has described its mission as helping customers “win the talent war.” The phrase reflects a belief that recruiting, especially in fields like AI and engineering, is becoming increasingly zero-sum: for one company to succeed in hiring a highly sought-after candidate, another must fail. To achieve this, Juicebox intends to channel its new funding into four key areas. It will scale its engineering and research teams to enhance its AI capabilities, invest heavily in bias testing, auditability, and trust controls to ensure its platform can be adopted by enterprises with strict compliance requirements, expand its integrations with major recruiting systems like Greenhouse, Lever, and Workday, and continue to broaden the data sources it can access to make searches richer and more reliable.

At the same time, the company is mindful of challenges ahead. Large incumbents in recruiting, including LinkedIn, SeekOut, and Eightfold, are embedding their own generative AI features. Juicebox argues that its advantage lies in being built as an LLM-native product from the beginning, rather than bolting AI onto an existing system. It believes this will allow it to innovate faster and provide deeper inference than competitors. Juicebox’s rise represents the broader shift underway in enterprise software, where natural language interfaces and AI inference are beginning to replace legacy paradigms. If it succeeds, the company may not just streamline recruiting but also redefine it, transforming the process of finding, engaging, and hiring talent into one that feels less mechanical and more intelligent. In the competitive arena of recruiting technology, Juicebox is betting that its AI-driven, intent-focused platform will give companies the edge they need to secure the people who will shape the future.