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With varied job experiences in brand strategy, event planning, and promoting workplace culture, Lakshmi Renegarajan, always found it hard to identify performance metrics to put on her resume. (That’s despite the fact that the Chicago resident should know how to package things–she has a masters from Northwestern in marketing communications.)
“It was always an insecurity of mine,” she says. Then she read a LinkedIn post by Teal about how to measure results from a job that at face-value, doesn’t have hard metrics. Realizing how her own resume missed out on some of those experiences, she decided to check out Teal and run her resume and a job description through its job match algorithm.
It was helpful, she says, but what really impressed her was when she won a raffle for a free normally $9-a-week premium Teal account and started using its artificial intelligence interview coach. The software asks questions based on job descriptions for specific roles and then gives the interviewee feedback based on their answer and resume. “It kept pushing me to quantify and measure my accomplishments,” she says. “It really made me excavate my career.”
Those examples were key during her interview for a remote events management position at a major technology company, where she’s set to start in a few weeks. “People are grilling a lot more on your outcomes and your ability to work with people during interviews,” she says. “I definitely felt more prepared because Teal kept asking me for examples.”
The AI interview coach is part of Teal’s latest premium offerings, announced today. The company also said today it has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding, co-led by CityLight Capital and Flybridge, with participation from Rethink Capital Partners and Lerer Hippeau. Both are part of the company’s push to become the ultimate “career copilot” that stays with users from job searches throughout their career journeys—like human career coaches, but at a fraction of the price.
“We’re not for the solopreneur nor the entrepreneur,” says David Fano, founder and CEO of Teal. “We’re for the intrapreneur, for the employee who wants to be an employee and doesn’t wanna feel capped by what the company is dictating for them.”
Fano started Teal in 2019 with the mission of helping workers take charge throughout their careers. But the pandemic-driven rise in unemployment and the rise of AI forced the former chief growth officer at WeWork to rethink Teal’s initial offerings. He decided to first build a job search tool, which would help job seekers with the first steps of an application.
“It’s harder to convince somebody outside of that job search moment to take out their credit card and sign up for a service that is going to help you further your career,” says Ben Lerer, managing partner at Lerer Hippeau, an investor in Teal.
Today, Teal’s offerings have grown to include help with cover letters, job matching, AI interview prep and salary and benefit comparisons. One million people signed-up to use Teal last year, doubling its customer base, but most of those don’t pay. And while Teal is not yet profitable (Fano says it’s not their primary goal at this point), the company brought in $4.2 million in revenue in 2024.
“The big vision for Teal is about giving people a copilot for their entire career,” adds Lerer. “Not thinking of just getting a job, but growing in that job and knowing when to ask for the raise.”
The overall AI career coaching industry has increased in popularity in the last year, but it’s still relatively small––Gartner’s HR practice told Forbes in August it was still too small to measure it on its own––and largely dominated by employer-centric offerings. Companies like BetterUp, Valence and Multiverse offer AI career coaching packages to companies which can then offer them to their employees. While a cheaper and faster alternative to traditional career coaching, access to the program is usually lost when an employee leaves the company.
Last year was a tough one for job seekers, who on average were unemployed for 23.3 weeks in December, up from 19.4 in December 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the start of the year is already looking brighter: Nearly two-thirds of employers are looking to hire full-time employees in the first half of 2025, according to recruiting firm Robert Half, 77% of CEOs are expecting the economy to improve in the coming months and 58% of people worldwide are planning to look for a job in 2025, according to LinkedIn.
Teal is hoping the flood in job seekers will mean more users of its services, especially the paid ones. In a market inundated with applications, splurging for interview prep or career coaches could be the key to stand out amongst other candidates. A survey by another AI job assistant search firm, EarnBetter, found that 25% of its free users are willing to pay for job search services. Of those who have paid, 37% spent $100 on all job search services while 10% spent over $500.
“Consumers used to think that the dollars they had allocated to career growth was for content,” says Fano. “Now it’s paying for the tooling and the things that give [you] leverage, and that these tools belong to them (and not their employer.)”
The challenge for Teal is to find those willing to pay; the majority of its customers still rely on its free version, which gives users unlimited resume and job tracking options but a limited amount of “AI credits.” Fano says 5% of users opt into its premium version within the first 24 hours of joining, which at $9 per week offers more analysis tools and email templates. The new AI interview and job comparison tools are also available only to premium users.
It’s a tough road to monetize consumer AI applications, admits Lerer, especially when a startup is competing with free options like ChatGPT or the employer-offered platforms that are free to workers.
“This has not been a consumer-pay category,” he says. “So if you’re going to pay, the product needs to be 95% or 100% of the job.”