HiringCafe has raised $6.8 million in pre-seed funding led by Spark Capital, with participation from Nonfiction Capital, Silicon Gardens, and angel investors from ZipRecruiter and Indeed. The company is also launching an AI Talent Agent designed to search millions of open jobs on behalf of individual candidates.
The San Francisco-based company has built an AI-powered job discovery platform that operates more like a search engine than a traditional job board.
Rather than relying primarily on employers to post or sponsor openings directly on its platform, HiringCafe indexes job listings from company career pages across the internet.
The company said this approach gives users access to roles that may not appear on major job boards and helps reduce exposure to outdated or inactive listings.
HiringCafe currently lists more than 5 million jobs and says its index contains as many as 400% more listings than some of the country’s largest job boards.
The company has also grown to more than 2 million monthly active users without spending money on marketing, according to the release.
Much of that growth has been driven by word of mouth and an active Reddit community.
HiringCafe is now building on that search index with its AI Talent Agent.
The free tool allows job seekers to create AI agents that continuously search the platform’s job database based on their background, experience, skills, and preferences.
Instead of repeatedly visiting job boards and running manual searches, users can have an agent monitor new openings around the clock and flag positions that appear relevant.
HiringCafe said its underlying index includes approximately 5.7 million open roles.
One feature, Always-On 24/7, continually monitors that index and surfaces new opportunities as they become available.
Another capability, Intelligent Resume Matching, allows users to upload their resume so the system can identify skills and experience and recommend jobs that align with their profile.
HiringCafe also says it actively filters listings it determines to be “ghost jobs,” a term commonly used for postings where an employer may not be actively hiring for the listed role.
The company is making the AI Talent Agent free for job seekers without a subscription fee.
HiringCafe’s founders argue that traditional job boards create an incomplete view of the employment market because many rely on paid listings, sponsored positions, and employer advertising.
The company said traditional platforms may surface only a portion of available roles and believes directly indexing employers’ career sites can expose candidates to a broader range of openings.
HiringCafe was originally developed as a side project.
Co-founder Ali Mir left his job in 2022 to build an HR startup. After friends were laid off from technology companies, he created a spreadsheet containing thousands of startup jobs that were difficult to find through existing platforms.
The project gained attention on social media and evolved through several iterations.
Co-founder Hamed Nilforoshan, who was pursuing a Ph.D. at Stanford at the time, later joined Mir to develop the concept into HiringCafe.
The founders subsequently expanded the platform into an automated job search engine using web indexing and AI technology.
The $6.8 million financing gives the company capital to expand the platform, improve its AI Talent Agent, and bring the service to additional job seekers.
Spark Capital General Partner Fraser Kelton said the company’s user growth without marketing spending was an indication of demand for a candidate-focused alternative to traditional job advertising platforms.
HiringCafe’s longer-term opportunity will depend on its ability to keep its job index current, identify active openings accurately, and provide recommendations that are sufficiently relevant to save candidates time.
The company is betting that combining broad job coverage with AI agents can shift job discovery away from repeated keyword searches toward a more automated model where software continuously works on behalf of the candidate.
KEY QUOTES:
“We realized that the modern job hunt is fundamentally broken because legacy platforms operate on an advertising model, not a true search model. They only show you the 20% of jobs that companies pay to promote, which creates hyper-competition and widespread burnout. By using AI to index the entire long tail of the job market, we are finally bringing the other 80% of jobs out of the dark and leveling the playing field for everyday job seekers.”
Hamed Nilforoshan, Co-Founder Of HiringCafe
“Ali and Hamed have the hallmark of great founders: a simple vision that seems obvious the moment they say it. HiringCafe is building the absolute best product for people looking for a job, not for people advertising jobs. Their growth so far, without any marketing spend, is a testament to how much people want a product genuinely focused on helping them find one.”
Fraser Kelton, General Partner At Spark Capital
@media (max-width: 767px) {
.pulse2-newsletter-cta {
font-size: var(–pulse2-cta-font-mobile, 16px) !important;
}
}