Paddy Lambros spent two and a half years advising roughly 100 European startups on hiring on the London-based enterprise capital agency Atomico. Throughout that point, he stored coming again to the identical statement: practically each enterprise downside at a younger firm may very well be traced to a hiring choice. “It was either not having the right people in the role or having the wrong people,” Lambros instructed Fortune. A foul rent right here, a stalled search there, and in any other case promising firms would grind to a halt.
That statement grew to become the genesis of Dex, an AI-powered recruiting startup Lambros based in early 2025. On Monday, Dex mentioned it had raised a $5.3 million seed spherical led by Notion Capital, with participation from a16z Speedrun, Idea Ventures and angel traders from OpenAI and different corporations.
The brand new funding brings the whole Dex has raised to $8.4 million, together with a $3.1 million pre-seed final 12 months.
Lambros declined to touch upon the startup’s valuation following the brand new funding.
Dex has up to now targeted on a single, profitable slice of the recruitment market: AI researchers, software program builders, and machine-learning and quantitative engineers. Greater than 15,000 engineers have signed up, and over 50 know-how firms—together with Lovable, ElevenLabs, Synthesia, Granola and Fyxer—are utilizing the service.
Since starting to cost for the product in late 2025, Dex has gone from zero to a roughly $1.8 million annualized income run fee, Lambros mentioned, including that it’s “conceivable” the corporate may very well be worthwhile by year-end.
The startup payments itself as an “AI talent agent.” Job seekers first maintain a dialog with Dex’s AI agent by both voice or textual content. This AI agent asks open-ended questions on an individual’s expertise, motivations and ambitions, then surfaces roles from a curated set of job openings, helps candidates analysis firms, benchmarks their compensation and prepares them for interviews. This AI expertise agent is constructed on a mixture of AI fashions from Google, Anthropic and OpenAI, Lambros mentioned.
Primarily based on the profiles these fashions construct, Dex then makes use of a proprietary matching engine constructed from what Lambros calls “old-school machine learning” to match candidates to potential employers. If there’s mutual curiosity from each events, Dex passes the candidate on to the hiring supervisor.
Notably, Dex doesn’t promote its software program to recruiters. “On the client side, we’re not building software for clients. We’re not building an integration for their [applicant tracking system],” Lambros mentioned. “What they really want are great candidates.” The startup prices employers between 20% and 30% of a employed candidate’s wage, the identical price construction utilized by conventional govt search corporations. “We only earn money if we do a good job,” Lambros mentioned.
Kamil Mieczakowski, the associate at Notion Capital who led the spherical, pointed in an announcement to the $856 billion world recruitment business, the place, he mentioned, the fee to rent retains rising whilst candidates and hiring managers complain of a worsening expertise. Lambros argues that AI able to sustained back-and-forth dialog has, for the primary time, made the company perform genuinely automatable—and doubtlessly higher. Not like a human recruiter, he mentioned, an AI agent can know lots of of 1000’s of firms and communicate to 1000’s of candidates a day.
Lambros has been within the recruiting trenches for practically a decade. In 2016, he joined the British spatial-computing startup Unbelievable when it had round 50 staff, and helped develop it to 650 throughout the U.Okay., U.S. and China. He then led folks and expertise operations on the construction-tech startup Sensat, earlier than becoming a member of Atomico.
Lambros is dismissive of the apparent incumbent menace—LinkedIn, which has rolled out its personal AI recruiting agent. “The data set is actually quite thin,” he mentioned of LinkedIn profiles, arguing that persons are unwilling to share detailed details about their work or ambitions on a public social community.
In distinction, candidates talking privately with the Dex agent can go into way more element than a CV would enable. He’s equally skeptical of “arms-length” sourcing instruments that scrape public knowledge and blast out chilly messages: “If the problem was cold outbound, we’d have solved this years ago,” he mentioned.
Nonetheless, Dex will not be alone in making an attempt to construct an AI platform to assist tech firms recruit gifted AI engineers. Rival recruitment startup Jack & Jill can also be specializing in this space and raised a $20 million seed spherical in October. Juicebox, one other competitor, raised a $30 million Collection A spherical in September.
Dex, presently headquartered in London, plans to make use of its new funding to open places of work in New York and San Francisco later this 12 months.
