A recruiting platform that utilizes conversational AI to improve job candidate searches has raised a seed round and launched its first product.
Moonhub, legally known as Ever Careers Inc., announced a $4.4 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures and GV and including AIX Ventures, Day One Ventures and several angel investors such as YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, Mike Volpi, Ram Shriram and Stanford AI Lab professor Christopher Ré.
The company was founded in 2022 by CEO Nancy Xu. She was studying computer science and AI at Stanford and left her Ph.D. and MBA program to start Moonhub after seeing other students struggle to get noticed by recruiters.
"We started Moonhub with this idea of enabling more people to have access to these opportunities by having them be seen for who they are beyond a couple of keywords that might be surfaced within their profile through a traditional recruiting platform or search engine," Xu told me.
Moonhub uses conversational AI to help recruiters expand the pool of candidates that they're looking at for open job positions.
Currently, Moonhub's own team of recruiters will run queries for hiring managers but Xu is aiming to open up the platform within a couple of years so that its customers can use it directly.
"The exciting thing is there's a lot that still needs to be built in the AI space, and we're building a lot of those things on our team right now," Xu said. "As the technology becomes better and better, you can get these models off the shelf. But right now you need a very specialized AI expert who's working closely with an expert recruiter to really understand, OK, what is the behavior that you normally have in this role? And then actually be able to teach the model how to have that behavior."
Moonhub delivers results by using large language models — a form of artificial intelligence — and scanning publicly available data in order to respond to queries through a conversational AI process.
In other words, ask it in plain English what you're looking for, and the system will be able to respond and even have a back-and-forth dialogue with you that feels natural.
The system is constantly trying to improve, as well, and Moonhub tracks queries so they can be improved.
Ultimately, the goal is to increase the diversity of applicants that are considered for jobs.
"On our own team, one of our best engineers does not have a high school degree," Xu said. "In a lot of these existing systems, you're essentially giving them keywords that are weak signal points that are not exactly what you're looking for."
For example, setting a filter to search for people with a bachelor's degree and above often overlooks skilled job candidates that just happen to not fit that one requirement.
Xu is growing Moonhub's own team, as well. The company has 17 employees, according to LinkedIn, and Xu told me they will be hiring aggressively this year.
