Metaview Raises $35M to Revolutionize Recruitment with AI-Powered Tools

Exclusive: Uber and Palantir alums raise $35M to disrupt corporate recruitment with AI

During his time at Uber, Magos spent much of his time on hiring and saw firsthand the way the process can become subjective and fragmented due to a lack of clear data, even at high-growth Fortune 500 companies. "To us, hiring at that time meant interviewing. It meant spending time with other human beings to sort of understand who they are. And there was this particular hiring loop that I was a part of where, when we turned up at the debrief...you just saw this massive delta between the folks that really knew how to run these and what to look for in great candidates and the people that didn't," he told Fortune. "Some people were just so data-driven in the facets they were sharing about the candidate, and other people were just completely going by gut," he said. "It made me realize that even these amazing companies are still fundamentally relying on shards of memories that people have of these human-to-human interactions and if you're ever going to significantly up-level hiring -- you're going to have to harness this conversational data." This is what led to the inspiration for the company's flagship product, an AI-notetaker that records and structures interview notes so hiring managers don't have to. Now, the company is planning to build a full suite of AI tools aimed at the recruiting and hiring process. The pair's history with and knowledge of corporate recruiting workflows drew in Vidu Shanmugarajah, a partner at Google Ventures. He sees this as an area "where digitalization skipped a step." Recruiting, which is heavy on admin, is ripe for disruption when it comes to developing AI tools. "Pre AI, it was quite basic what you could do in and around hiring. It was sort of like software 1.0...you weren't able to go anywhere near as deep as you can go as you can now with LLMs, but to be able to do that, you need to spend a lot of time in and around hiring workflows," Shanmugarajah told Fortune. "They've been building for hiring and in recruitment," Shanmugarajah said of Magos and Shahriar Tajbakhsh. "You need to spend a lot of time in and around hiring workflows, which they've done in their prior roles at Uber and Palantir, and you also need to be able to build with a real understanding of who the users are and how their hiring workflows have been developed over time." Metaview's latest round also includes continued backing from existing investors, including Plural, Vertex Ventures, Seedcamp, Coelius Capital, True Equity, as well as Victor Riparbelli and Barney Hussey-Yeo, and builds off its previous $7 million Series A in March last year. The company plans to use the funds to build out its full suite of AI tools, hire more staff at its London headquarters, and expand its presence in San Francisco. "The focus for us now is to really build out the rest of the platform," Magos said. "So our big thesis for the company, since the start..is obviously AI is going to change how we work." Metaview's full suite of AI tools aims to streamline and enhance every stage of the hiring process. The company's flagship product is an AI note-taking app for recruiters and hiring managers that records, analyzes, and summarizes job interviews, but it's also working on: AI Reports, a customizable reporting engine for optimizing the hiring funnel; AI Answers, an always-on assistant that delivers instant information about any candidate, job, or hiring detail; and AI Job Posts, which generates and maintains job descriptions so teams can launch new searches in seconds rather than days. Metaview says its customers, which include Sony, Brex, ElevenLabs, and Deliveroo, save 30 minutes after every interview and up to two hours per job post. While other companies offer similar note-taking services, Magos sees Metaview as protected from threats from general-purpose tools like Microsoft Copilot through its specialization in recruitment workflows. Metaview integrates directly with recruiting tools such as applicant tracking systems and is designed to understand the specific context of recruiting conversations. Magos says specialized data and domain-specific post-training, allowing Metaview's AI tools to generate far more accurate and relevant summaries. There are concerns about how much AI should be used in the recruiting process, especially if decisions are being influenced or made by AI agents. Under the EU AI Act, HR-related applications of artificial intelligence -- including recruitment -- are classified as 'high risk', due to concerns around transparency, fairness, and ethical implications in their use. Magos says the company is not trying to automate the hiring decisions, but rather the admin that comes with writing a job post, searching for candidates, and making interview notes. He says Metaview's software never offers advice about who to actually hire: "Where we draw the line at the moment is that we leave the human-to-human interaction to humans. But some of the work associated with spending a ton of time sort of scrolling through LinkedIn to find these candidates is something we're working on." Magos also told Fortune the tech has the potential to take some of the subjectivity out of hiring and encourage more data-backed decisions. However, AI tools often bring their own bias to the table, something that has worried HR professionals. For example, three-quarters of employers in a recent ISE Student Recruitment Survey said they worried about the potential for bias and preferred a more human-centric approach to recruitment. In response to some of these concerns, Magos argues that speech-to-text systems provided by LLMs are better than most human attempts at it. When it comes to bias, Metaview's biggest mitigation is ensuring that its AI assistants don't become "a judgment tool" or "make recommendations about who to hire."

AI hiring startup Metaview raises $35M to automate recruiters' admin work

AI hiring startup Metaview raises $35M to automate recruiters' admin work Artificial intelligence recruitment platform startup Metaview Labs Inc. has snagged $35 million in funding from investors including Google Ventures, building on a $7 million Series A investment that was closed one year earlier. Plural, Vertex Ventures, Seedcamp, Coelius Capita, True Equity and angel investors such as Victor Riparbelli and Barney Hussey-Yeo also participated in the round, Metaview said. The startup, which was co-founded by former Uber Technologies Inc. and Palantir Inc. executives, said in today's announcement it wants to transform the way enterprises recruit staff by using AI to automate much of the heavy lifting involved. To do this, Metaview offers tools that help to streamline notetaking, create job descriptions and optimize hiring workflows. Its main tool is an AI-powered notetaking application that's used by recruiters to automatically record, analyze and summarize candidate interviews. But that's just the start. It's also developing a Reports tool that will help to optimize companies' hiring funnels and an AI Assistant that will instantly respond to any question hiring managers have about a particular candidate, or the details of a specific position. Another tool in the pipeline is AI Job Posts, which will be able to generate and update job descriptions, so hiring managers can quickly launch a new talent search whenever a position comes available. Metaview says its platform integrates with traditional recruitment platforms that offer applicant tracking systems, and its underlying AI models have been fine-tuned to understand the context of recruiting conversations. As a result of this training, the startup says, it can generate much more accurate summaries than general purpose AI tools. It has convinced quite a few major enterprises of the advantages it provides, listing clients such as Sony Corp., ElevenLabs Inc., Deliveroo and Brex Inc. It says it can save these customers up to 30 minutes following every interview that would be spent on going through the notes, and around two hours of administrative work in total for every job filled. In an interview with Fortune, Metaview Chief Executive Siadhal Magos said he spent much of his time at Uber on interviewing job candidates, and has firsthand experience of how the process becomes "subjective and fragmented" because of a lack of clear data. He said this made him realize that even the biggest companies in the world are making key hiring decisions based on instincts. "You just saw this massive delta between the folks that really knew how to run these and what to look for in great candidates and the people that didn't," he said. "Some people were just so data-driven in the facets they were sharing about the candidate, and other people were just completely going by gut." Although today's funding round is a strong validation of Metaview's technology, the company also faces scrutiny by critics who argue that AI shouldn't have a role in hiring decisions. Those critics include the European Union, which labels human resources-focused AI applications as "high risk" in its AI Act, due to concerns over their fairness and transparency. Magos told Fortune that Metaview is not trying to make job hiring decisions on behalf of enterprises, but rather just automate the manual admin work, such as writing job posts and taking notes during interviews. "Where we draw the line at the moment is that we leave the human-to-human interaction to humans," he said. "But some of the work associated with spending a ton of time sort of scrolling through LinkedIn to find these candidates is something we're working on." Google Ventures Partner Vidu Shanmugarajah has been convinced of Metaview's merits, and he told Fortune that the administrative work in job hiring workflows is an area that's ripe for AI disruption. "You need to spend a lot of time in and around hiring workflows... and you also need to be able to build with a real understanding of who the users are and how their hiring workflows have been developed over time," Shanmugarajah said.