Juicebox, a Berlin-based startup co-founded by David Paffenholz and Ishan Gupta, has to date raised $36 million in funding. This colossal sum in part stems from a $30 million Series A round that Sequoia Capital recently led. The company’s ambitious mission is to disrupt the way companies hire talent. It taps into the power of large language models (LLMs) through its cutting-edge AI-powered search engine, PeopleGPT, which debuted in late 2023.
The journey of Juicebox began when Paffenholz and Gupta, then just 22 and 19 years old, recognized the potential of LLMs to streamline talent acquisition. Their innovative, inclusive technology empowers organizations to better identify the most qualified and diverse candidates. It predicts key attributes of candidates, emulating the savvy know-how of human talent recruiters.
Since its launch, Juicebox has quickly gained popularity with a wide-ranging clientele. The search engine’s capabilities have attracted a wide range of customers, from small startups to well-established firms such as Cognition, Ramp, and Perplexity. When one considers that in only 2 ½ months Juicebox has acquired more than 2,500 customers. It’s on track to quickly exceed $10 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue).
Partner at Sequoia David Cahn first learned about Juicebox when he was talking to an early-stage startup founder about recruitment strategies. This founder took advantage of Juicebox for all stages of hiring. In just one year, they hired more than a dozen new staff without the help of a professional headhunter. Additionally, Sequoia’s own internal recruitment team soon started using Juicebox themselves to improve their own hiring practice.
Cahn was excited about the potential Juicebox has to make waves in the startup ecosystem. As he put it, “We’ve already made investments—the defaults are Stripe for the fintechs, Plaid for account aggregators. This is how I think Juicebox can become the default tool for startups. It could even be their top selection for where to recruit their new hires onto their first-ever team.
The beauty of Juicebox is its power to find talent that a more conventional search approach would miss. Paffenholz stressed the benefit when she remarked, “We help find new candidates who would not have been found otherwise. Their CVs or profiles do not have the keywords or characteristics you would typically find in a default search.”
Cahn is a strong believer in Paffenholz and Gupta’s vision and expertise. He believes they have a chance to make Juicebox the must-have tool in any startup’s technology stack. Today’s hearing, Rep. Tom Reed lauded that explosive growth. During my career, I’ve never witnessed a team of only four people signing up 2,000 customers, he shouted.