Juicebox just pulled off one of the most impressive funding stories in recruiting tech - the Y Combinator startup raised $30 million from Sequoia after reaching $10 million in annual recurring revenue with just four employees. The AI-powered search engine is already being used by recruiters at OpenAI, Perplexity, and Ramp to find candidates faster than traditional keyword-based tools.
Juicebox is rewriting the rules of startup growth - and Sequoia just bet $30 million on it. The AI recruiting startup announced its Series A funding Thursday, capping off a meteoric rise that saw founders David Paffenholz and Ishan Gupta build a $10 million ARR business with just four people.
The numbers tell an almost unbelievable story. When Paffenholz was 22 and Gupta just 19, they realized large language models could revolutionize how companies find talent. Instead of the traditional keyword searches that force recruiters to manually sift through profiles, their AI engine uses natural language to analyze professional websites, social profiles, and public information to surface the best candidates.
"I'm not sure I've ever in my career seen a company with four people that got to 2,000 customers with that small of a team," Sequoia partner David Cahn told TechCrunch. That customer base includes high-profile names like OpenAI, Perplexity, and Ramp - companies racing to hire AI talent in an increasingly competitive market.
Cahn discovered Juicebox through word-of-mouth, the kind of organic growth that gets VCs excited. An early-stage founder told him he'd hired over a dozen people using Juicebox without touching a professional recruiter - something that was nearly impossible before. Then Cahn learned Sequoia's own internal recruiter was testing the platform, which sealed his interest.
What sets Juicebox apart isn't just the AI - it's the inference capabilities that mirror human thinking. "We help find net new candidates that wouldn't be found elsewhere, because the profiles might not have the keywords or the types of things that we'd expect them to have in the regular searches," Paffenholz explained to TechCrunch.
