Ready, AI, Hire: Announcing Our Investment in Tezi

The Universal Challenge

Recruiting is a founder’s most important job. The returns on top talent, and the network effect of smart people pulling in smart people, are the not-so-secret secrets to our work at 8VC - and building Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov, and Saronic, to name a few. Yet conventional hiring is slow and expensive. You need to ramp up in-house recruiters to overcome scaling bottlenecks (creating fixed costs for variable needs), or pay contract firms steep commissions (up to $20-40,000 for senior technical hires). $250 billion a year is spent on recruiting in the US, almost entirely on labor. Software only represents 2.6% of that spend, and is mostly mediocre. It’s also built for recruiters, not hiring managers, highlighting a bigger issue: recruiting outsources input away from a new hire’s future team, while steadily increasing overhead.   

What if software could help hiring teams scale relative to new openings without new recruiters, and protect quality while slashing labor cost? Enter Tezi, the autonomous AI recruiting partner. Tezi’s value proposition is twofold: First, Tezi creates 10x more hiring capacity at a fraction of the cost and operational pain, while dramatically reducing time-to-hire. Second, Tezi enables companies to run an ultra-lean recruiting team and redirect headcount to R&D, sales & marketing, etc, without sacrificing candidate quality or experience.

Laying the Foundation

As we will explore, AI-enabled recruiting is still very much about people. At Tezi, it begins with co-founders Raghavendra Prabhu, aka RVP (CEO), previously Head of Engineering at Covariant and CTO at Thumbtack, and Jason James (COO), previously VP of Product & Design at Instacart and Thumbtack. RVP has spent 22 years in engineering, while Jason has spent 22 years in product & design. Between them, they’ve hired over 500 engineers, product managers, and designers, giving them an intimate understanding of the workflows and stages of recruiting. At a basic level, those workflows can be broken down as follows:

• Sourcing: Searching; list-building; outreach; calibrating with hiring manager
• Coordinating: Scheduling; rescheduling; coordinating onsite interviews and travel
• Recruiting: Posting jobs; screening; selling the company and role; triaging referrals and inbound; nudging interviewers; offers/rejections (and in the early stage, recruiting encompasses the first two scopes)

Many recruiting functions can be automated, but it’s not as simple as delegating everything to LLMs. With so many units of labor, the questions are what to automate, and when? 

"...agents are key to building recruiting skillsets, rather than simply replicating processes..."

Onscreen & Under the Hood

Max is Tezi’s autonomous AI-based recruiting agent, built to handle end-to-end requirements for hiring managers, as well as in-house recruiters. In Tezi’s initial product, these requirements include the whole sourcing process, scheduling, and core recruiting functions like screening & reporting. Tezi delivers each of these through integrated mechanisms, meeting users where they are (e.g. Slack) vs. pushing yet-another-SaaS. Tezi’s Max is one of the best examples we’ve seen today of agentic AI in enterprise software – with an army of agents fine-tuned to perform specialized recruiting tasks, seamlessly orchestrated under one unified experience. 

Today, Tezi provides AI-enabled agentic workflow automation. Tezi works with your systems of record, and because it includes a native ATS and candidate database, it can also serve as a standalone recruiting solution for lightweight teams. In the future, Tezi plans to layer in even more agentic workflows, including candidate analysis and recommendations, candidate engagement, coaching, and hard skills interviewing. 

While it’s obligatory to note that engineering leaders, given the option, would rather delegate recruiting tasks to a machine, agents are key to moving past simply replicating processes, into building recruiting skillsets. Max will learn from live feedback, rapidly incorporating how hiring managers want to do things, whereas humans have strong priors that are hard to shake. Agents can run experiments, e.g. A/B testing messages or job descriptions, learning and teaching human users to refine processes as they go. Max also responds instantly, is always online, and can multitask safely.

The hiring manager is both a customer persona, and essential to calibrating the product against ~750 million available candidate profiles. Tezi’s philosophy is to rigorously evaluate which jobs AI can and can’t do, and help hiring managers engage directly and perfect non-scalable responsibilities: evaluating, exciting, and enlisting great candidates, defining what “great” looks like, and persisting tribal knowledge. Tezi also lets recruiting leads and small teams scale without adding headcount, and devote resources to elevating the candidate experience.

Tezi Today & Tomorrow: The 8VC Perspective

Today, Tezi is out of stealth, and opening its waitlist to new companies beyond its initial cohort of twenty design partners. Tezi also announced a $9 million seed round, led by 8VC and Audacious, with participation from angels including the founders of Instacart and Thumbtack. This round will allow Tezi to fill out its technical team, and continue to build out Max’s capabilities, streamlining more of their customers’ recruiting workflow. 

We are exceptionally bullish on Tezi in several facets. As a business, they have redrawn the parameters of recruiting software. First, they tap into the labor budget (97.4% of recruiting spend), and second, they serve hiring managers, the ultimate decision-makers. They are addressing widespread pain with quantifiable costs, automating the routine and capturing an intentional subset of high-touch, interactive workflows. RVP and Jason have both had distinguished careers building vibrant, intense technical and product cultures, and have the hiring experience to form the right design opinions. Their combination of engineering and design thinking will enable them to build something powerful, usable, and beautiful, while continuously balancing AI and human elements.

Talent is the lifeblood of any business. In Tezi, we see a revolutionary means of renewing the supply while strengthening, not distracting from, the company's fundamental purpose.