With OpenAI and Shopify As Customers, Ashby Raises $50M Series D For AI-Powered Talent Platform

In today’s competitive hiring environment, the ability for companies to move quickly on talent is more paramount than ever. That includes identifying high-quality candidates and moving them through the pipeline faster than competitors are able to.

Enter Ashby. The 7-year-old San Francisco-based startup has built an “all-in-one” AI-powered platform designed to help businesses more efficiently manage the recruitment process. As a testament to its growing popularity, Ashby says it more than doubled its customer base over the past year — from about 1,300 to more than 2,700 — and saw its ARR jump by 135%.

Those customers are a high-profile bunch, including the likes of startups Ramp, OpenAI, Harvey.ai, Notion and Cursor, as well as enterprises such as Shopify and Snowflake. The company aims to replace three or four products at any given company with its offering.

“We’re becoming a default for startups and for the midmarket,” said CEO and co-founder Benji Encz in an interview. “The vast majority of our growth has been word of mouth.” Ashby’s enterprise segment is growing as well — 123% year over year.

Benji Encz and Abhik Pramanik, co-founders of Ashby

Investors appear to like what they see. Today, Ashby is announcing that it has raised $50 million in a Series D round of funding, just over one year after raising its $30 million Series C, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively. The company declined to reveal its valuation, saying only it was a 2x increase compared to its most recent raise.

Alkeon Capital and returning backer Lachy Groom co-led the round, which also included participation from F-Prime, Elad Gil, Gaingels and others.

Encz claims the company still has the “vast majority” of its Series C left in the bank.

“Our burn multiple has been below one for all of this year,” he told Crunchbase News. “We got preemptive interest on strong terms and since there are a number of years we’re going to invest before turning profitable, we felt it was a good time to add to the cash balance.”

“The extra $50 million puts us in a much more comfortable position,” he added.

Integration is key

Ashby co-founders Encz and Abhik Pramanik met while working at construction software startup PlanGrid. As director of engineering, Encz spent much of his time recruiting. Pramanik was a senior product manager.

They spent the first two years after starting Ashby building out the product before launching in 2020. Their strategy was to build everything in-house so all the products could be integrated, and to do so in a way in which it would have the ability “to build future products.”

“The underlying foundation that we invested in significantly in the first two years of building Ashby is what enables us to add on these additional products into one platform with a clean user experience across all needs of a talent acquisition team,” Encz said.

At the core of Ashby’s offering is an Applicant Tracking System, which manages all of the interactions of applications for any given company, down to extending offers. But also layered into its software is a CRM to help companies discover talent; a scheduling tool that allows applicants to self-schedule; and pipeline analytics and sourcing via LLM-powered search.

The tasks Ashby’s software can do for a company include posting job openings on platforms outside of a company’s website, ask qualified and open-ended questions in job postings “to get signals from a candidate,” and personalizing outreach in sourcing.

A big part of what Ashby touts is that it not only helps companies manage applicants but also “goes after candidates who are not applying,” Encz said.

Early AI adoption

The company claims it was among the first to market with AI functionality at the time of its Series C. Doing so means teams don’t need to add on another AI tool, but rather take advantage of the fact that AI is embedded into Ashby’s product, according to Encz.

“We have a number of existing and upcoming AI features, with usage of AI in Ashby growing 50% over the past year alone,” he told Crunchbase News.

However, Encz is quick to point out that Ashby is not totally reliant on AI.

“The way we’ve designed it is that we always still keep the human in the loop,” he said. “… but it’s still always a human reviewing date in the end.”

‘Intelligent hiring operating system’

Ashby is using its new capital primarily to invest in product development (specifically focusing on advancing its AI capabilities), customer success and its talent community programs.

Presently, the remote-first company has 220 employees in over 21 countries. It also has customers around the globe but is currently focused on North America and EMEA.

Mark McLaughlin, general partner at Alkeon Capital, told Crunchbase News via email that he views Ashby as an “intelligent hiring operating system” that helps companies “operate with precision, speed and intelligence.”

“The world is entering a new infrastructure cycle. Every system that companies rely on — CRM, ERP, finance, security, and yes, hiring — is being rebuilt with AI at the core,” he added. “We believe Ashby is the clear candidate to own not just the traditional ATS swim lane but also, and more importantly, the expanded footprint of what a modern talent OS can be.”