Tezi Develops AI-Powered Hiring Agent for HR Managers

In the rapidly evolving field of AI, Tezi, an early-stage startup, is making waves with its innovative AI agent designed to assist HR teams in finding ideal job candidates. This AI bot aims to streamline the hiring process by sifting through resumes, scheduling interviews, and sending out email invitations to candidates, significantly reducing the manual workload of recruiters.

Tezi has announced a $9 million seed funding round to accelerate the development of its AI hiring agent. The company is currently rolling out an alpha version of the product to select design customers, marking the first step toward a broader release.

According to CEO and co-founder Raghavendra Prabhu, while automated resume screening isn't new, Tezi leverages the latest advancements in large language models (LLMs) to offer a more sophisticated recruiting tool. "We saw an opportunity to combine reasoning and natural language processing to create something fundamentally different from traditional software in this space," Prabhu explained.

Co-founder and COO Jason James highlighted that existing tools fall short by only ranking resumes. "With thousands of applications for a job, past AI or ML tools could identify good resumes, but humans still had to handle scheduling and emails. Now, we aim to automate the entire workflow," James said.

The founders emphasize that while human oversight remains essential, the goal is full automation as AI models advance. They are also working to minimize bias in the hiring process by focusing on skills and criteria specified by hiring managers, rather than relying on historical hiring patterns.

Tezi has trained its models on 250 million profiles, licensed from various data providers, and is collaborating with OpenAI and Anthropic to fine-tune the AI for recruitment purposes. Launched at the beginning of this year, the company is currently working with 15-20 design customers and plans to expand to a wider beta later this year.

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