HiringCafe, an agentic job discovery platform, has raised $6.8 million in pre-seed funding to expand its AI-powered job search technology.
The round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from Nonfiction Capital, Silicon Gardens and angel investors from ZipRecruiter and Indeed.
Alongside the funding, HiringCafe has launched its AI Talent Agent, which allows job seekers to create AI agents that search millions of job listings on their behalf.
HiringCafe says traditional job boards often focus on sponsored listings and jobs from large employers, leaving many available positions difficult for job seekers to discover.
The company estimates that traditional job boards may represent only about 20% of total open roles, forcing large numbers of applicants to compete for a limited selection of publicly listed positions.
HiringCafe aims to address this gap by operating more like a real-time job search engine than a traditional job board.
The platform uses internet-wide search technology and AI agents to find jobs directly from company career pages rather than relying only on job aggregators.
HiringCafe says its platform now lists more than 5 million jobs, including roles that may not appear on major job boards.
The newly launched AI Talent Agent is designed to continuously search HiringCafe’s job index and identify relevant opportunities for job seekers.
The platform includes several features designed to simplify the job search process.
24/7 job discovery: The AI continuously searches its real-time index for newly posted roles and can identify opportunities as they become available.
Resume matching: Users can upload their resumes, allowing the AI to analyze their experience and skills and recommend relevant positions.
Ghost-job filtering: HiringCafe says its system filters job listings that appear inactive or are no longer actively hiring.
Free for job seekers: The AI Talent Agent is available to users without a subscription or paywall.
HiringCafe was originally created as a side project to help job seekers find hard-to-discover startup jobs.
In 2022, co-founder Ali Mir began building an HR startup. After friends were laid off from major technology companies, Mir created a spreadsheet containing around 10,000 startup job openings.
The list gained significant attention on social media and was repeatedly shared, eventually attracting millions of views.
Co-founder Hamed Nilforoshan, who was pursuing a PhD at Stanford at the time, later joined the project after seeing its impact on job seekers.
The founders say HiringCafe has since grown primarily through word-of-mouth and its online community, reaching more than 2 million monthly active users.
With its latest funding, HiringCafe plans to further develop its job discovery technology and expand the use of AI agents across the job search process.
The company’s approach focuses on finding roles directly from employer career pages and helping candidates navigate a larger pool of job opportunities.
As AI agents become increasingly capable of searching, filtering and organizing information on behalf of users, HiringCafe is positioning its AI Talent Agent as a tool for making job discovery more automated and personalized.
