Tezi is building an AI agent for hiring managers

AI agents are all the rage right now, and Tezi, an early-stage startup, is working on one to help HR teams find the perfect candidates for a job opening. The startup claims this bot will sift through resumes to find the ones that match the hiring criteria, find time on the recruiter’s calendar to set up an interview and send out the email to the candidate.

Today the company announced a $9 million seed to help fuel its journey to generally available product.

For now, they are rolling out the alpha product with a handful of design customers just this week, but that’s the vision, according to CEO and co-founder Raghavendra Prabhu. He acknowledged that HR has been using automated resume screening for some time, but Tezi saw an opportunity with the new generation of large language models (LLMs ) to build a more sophisticated recruiting tool for HR.

“I think it’s the combination of reasoning and natural language that we felt gave us an option to build something very, very different from what’s historically been done by software in this space,” he said.

His co-founder and COO, Jason James, says that existing tools don’t go far enough in his view. “Let’s say you get a thousand applications for a job. AI or ML or algorithms in the past would be good at saying these resumes are very good,” he said. “But a human still needs to send emails and schedule interviews and all of that. And what’s possible now is an end-to-end workflow, not just basic ranking.”

The founders acknowledged that at this stage, humans need to stay engaged in the process and the hope is that it will be fully automated as models improve. What’s more, the pool of candidates that emerge from any job search is going to be dependent on the quality of the prompts and job descriptions.

While they understand that automation can lead to bias, they are working on mitigating that to the extent possible. From their perspective, they are taking whatever inputs come from the hiring manager and assessing that against the resumes in an objective manner. They can’t control what the inputs look like, but they say they are trying to minimize bias on their end.

“If you’re assuming that there’s bias coming in from the employer, we at this time aren’t going to be excellent at preventing that. What we will be doing on our side is protecting against us adding any sort of bias into the mix through algorithmic means,” James said. They are avoiding looking at historic hiring patterns. They want the models to match by skills and other criteria set by the hiring manager.

They have trained their models on 250 million profiles that they have licensed from data providers and have been working with OpenAI and Anthropic models so far and tuning them to their hiring requirements. 

The company is just starting. It launched at the beginning of this year. They are beginning work with 15-20 design customers, and the hope is that they will work out all the kinks and get to a wider beta distribution later this year.

The $9 million seed was led by 8VC and Audacious Ventures with participation from Liquid 2, Afore, PrimeSet, South Park Commons and industry angels.