HiringCafe Raises $6.8M and Launches AI Talent Agent to Help Candidates Find the Perfect Role Across Millions of Jobs
HiringCafe, an agentic job discovery platform, led by Ali Mir and Hamed Nilforoshan, has raised $6.8 million in pre-seed funding led by Spark Capital, along with Nonfiction Capital, Silicon Gardens, and angel investors from ZipRecruiter and Indeed. The company is also launching its AI Talent Agent, allowing anyone to create AI agents to search across millions of jobs on their behalf.
Jobseekers’ Problem: Millions of Applicants Fighting for a Fraction of Roles
Legacy job boards capture only a fraction of the job market, leaving millions of applicants competing for limited visible roles. Shallow keyword matching fuels mass applications and poor candidate-job fit, overwhelming employers and driving more roles into automated screening or the hidden job market.
“A few weeks ago I learned that my position is being eliminated and immediately went to HiringCafe. Today, I accepted an offer of employment with a new company! With my whole heart, THANK YOU! You guys are doing something amazing, and every chance I get, I tell people who are job searching to check out HiringCafe,” said Karen Joyce, a user of Hiring Cafe.
HiringCafe’s Solution: A Real-Time Search Engine and AI Talent Agent.
HiringCafe is building a real-time job search engine that indexes company career pages directly, rather than relying on traditional job boards and aggregators. Its index now includes 5M+ jobs, significantly expanding the pool of discoverable roles. An AI talent agent further helps candidates navigate this index through real-time job discovery, resume-based matching, and filtering of inactive or potentially fraudulent listings, all available free to job seekers.
Key features include:
Real-Time Discovery: Continuously monitors millions of job listings for newly posted roles.
Resume Matching: Uses AI to match candidate experience and skills with relevant positions.
Ghost Job Filtering: Identifies and filters potentially inactive listings.
Free Access: Provides the AI talent agent without a subscription or paywall.
"We realized that the modern job hunt is fundamentally broken because legacy platforms operate on an advertising model, not a true search model. They only show you the 20% of jobs that companies pay to promote, which creates hyper-competition and widespread burnout," said Hamed Nilforoshan, co-founder of HiringCafe. "By using AI to index the entire long tail of the job market, we are finally bringing the other 80% of jobs out of the dark and leveling the playing field for everyday job seekers."
Born from a Viral Side Project to Help Jobseekers.
HiringCafe began as a side project in 2022, when co-founder Ali Mir created a spreadsheet of hard-to-find startup jobs after friends were laid off from major tech companies. The list repeatedly went viral, reaching millions of views and highlighting demand for better job discovery. Stanford PhD candidate Hamed Nilforoshan later joined as co-founder, and the platform has since grown largely through word-of-mouth and its Reddit community, reaching more than 2 million monthly active users.
"Ali and Hamed have the hallmark of great founders: a simple vision that seems obvious the moment they say it,” said Fraser Kelton, General Partner at Spark Capital. “HiringCafe is building the absolute best product for people looking for a job, not for people advertising jobs. Their growth so far, without any marketing spend, is a testament to how much people want a product genuinely focused on helping them find one."
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