San Francisco-based Juicebox, an AI-powered search engine for talent discovery, has raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital, bringing its total funding to $36M.
The round comes as Juicebox’s flagship product, PeopleGPT, rapidly scales to more than 2,500 customers and $10M in annual recurring revenue, less than two years after launch.
Reinventing Talent Search With LLMs
Recruiters have long relied on keyword searches through résumés and LinkedIn profiles—a process still requiring manual review. The founders David Paffenholz (then 22) and Ishan Gupta (19) saw an opportunity to change this with large language models.
Their platform goes beyond keywords, scanning professional profiles, websites, and public data to infer candidate fit much like a human recruiter would. It surfaces “net new” candidates often missed by traditional searches and can automatically email and schedule calls with prospects.
“Hiring speed is mission-critical in the AI era. Juicebox doesn’t just make searches faster—it finds people others can’t,” said Paffenholz.
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Early Growth and Sequoia’s Bet
The startup emerged from Y Combinator in 2022, refining its technology before launching PeopleGPT in late 2023. Within months, companies from Cognition and Ramp to Perplexity adopted the tool.
When Sequoia partner David Cahn discovered that both founders and even Sequoia’s own recruiters were using Juicebox, the firm moved to lead the round.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a four-person team reach 2,000 customers this quickly,” Cahn noted.
Juicebox has since grown its team to 12 employees—still without a dedicated sales force—relying on product-led adoption.
Competitive Edge
While legacy players like Eightfold are adding AI-driven search, Juicebox is positioning itself as the default recruiting layer for startups.
“We’ve backed companies like Stripe that became defaults for early-stage founders,” said Cahn. “Juicebox has the potential to do the same for hiring.”
Looking Ahead
The company plans to expand its LLM-powered platform to more enterprise teams while maintaining its focus on speed and automation.
The firm’s long-term vision: to replace the fragmented, manual recruiting stack with AI-native candidate discovery that scales from seed-stage startups to global enterprises.
