A16Z supports the British startup Dex to scale “the AI ​​talent agent” and the Matchmaker recruitment

Andreessen Horowitz, VC company from Silicon Val, supports an emerging British startup which aims to “redefine” how AI is used to match companies with talents.

DexAs the startup is called, targets candidates and businesses with various recruitment intelligences powered by AI, including matchmaking and coaching, with a view to improving long -term retention.

Dex is the work of the CTO Harry Uglow and CEO Paddy blade (photo above), which recently left its positions as a software engineer and responsible for talents, respectively, to the European company of venture capital atomo. While they say that Dex has already attracted a dozen British technology companies on board (“including two high-level British unicorns”), the platform remains in a closed beta version for the moment because they refine things before a larger launch later this year.

Before that, the startup based in London announced Tuesday that it had raised $ 3.1 million in a pre-series funding series led by Speedrun funds of A16z and concept ventures, with the participation of a multitude of angels from all over the technological landscape and VC, in particular: the member of the Meta Board Charlie Songhurst; Deliveroo COO Eric French; CEO of incident.io, Stephen Whitworth; Noirition Capital Partner Kamil Mieczakowski; And the former partner of the Atomico Bryce Keane.

To hire

With AI becomes more and more intertwined In the field of recruitment, Dex enters a loaded space – this includes Emerging startups,, well -funded unicornsand new AI intelligence cooked directly in Linkedin. However, Dex sees a gap for a global platform which is focused on the laser on Really Get to know the candidates.

In the first case, DEX – which the company presents as an “vocal talented agent” – Converse with candidates via a call to obtain an understanding of their experience, their skills, their ambitions, etc. Subsequently, Dex can help them plan their next career move; present them with relevant opportunities; prepare them for interviews; And even negotiate offers they can receive.

It should be noted that Dex will work both for passive candidates – that is to say those who do not actively seek a new job – and those who have a lot of hunting. For example, once Dex has built a candidate’s profile, he can keep an eye on open positions announced on the web – perhaps very specific types of roles in very specific companies – and serve alerts when such opportunities appear.

For those who are actively looking for new work, Dex can go nine meters, from research to application.

“Dex talks about what you want – your preferences and your needs – and asks questions to deeply understand your experience and skills,” Lambros at Techcrunch explained. “Using this data, Dex then maps the entire market to find the most appropriate opportunities and surfaces them to you. If you want to continue, Dex manages the application – more CV, no more cover letter – and when there is a match, presents the recruitment manager. ”

Thus, for candidates, Dex is less market or employment council, and the more an AI agent who does all the banal things for them.

“We believe that candidates do not want to browse hundreds of generic job announcements, so you are looking for you, making you save hours of scrolling, research, then applying,” said Lambros.

After all this, Dex can lead to candidates for their maintenance and even provide market data on things such as average compensation for such roles.

Lambros said that in addition to relying on “large sets of public data and thousands of interviews and call transcriptions”, Dex spoke to more than 50 of the “most experienced recruitment leaders” in the United Kingdom to learn more about their recruitment methodology, and what they are looking for in their ideal candidates. And all this data, in the end, entered Dex.

Under the hood, Dex is built on several LLM suppliers, including OpenAi, Google (Gemini) and Meta (Llama), switching depending on the improvements introduced with each respective model.

“We are constantly evaluating and changing suppliers to make sure that we are able to benefit from the latest advances,” said Uglow.

On the company side, in the meantime, Dex conversed with the recruitment teams to establish their preferences for their ideal candidate.

“Dex speaks with job managers and candidates to deeply understand what a good adjustment looks like,” said Uglow. “Culture, behaviors, desires, needs and ambitions of individuals and businesses. This is then combined with a wide range of data accessible to the public, feeding our recommendation systems to organize personalized correspondence. ”

With 3.1 million dollars at the bank, the company is now accelerating its hiring through engineering and marketing, with a view to launching publicly from the United Kingdom, before turning to international markets.

“Hiring is not to fill seats – it is a question of creating sustainable partnerships that benefit employees and companies,” said Lambros. “With this funding, we will help companies keep the best talents and allow employees to find work they like.”