AI job search platform HiringCafe secured a $6.8 million pre-seed round, led by Spark Capital, to scale its free candidate focused AI Talent Agent and career-page indexing engine that already serves over 2 million monthly users.
HiringCafe raised $6.8 million in a pre-seed round led by Spark Capital, with participation from Nonfiction Capital, Silicon Gardens, and strategic angel investors from ZipRecruiter and Indeed. This is the company’s first institutional funding and its total capital raised to date.
What is HiringCafe?
HiringCafe is an agentic job discovery platform (operated by SPICYHR Inc.) that functions more like a real time internet search engine than a traditional job board. It uses proprietary web scraping technology and AI agents to index job openings directly from company career pages rather than relying on employer-sponsored or paid listings.
As of the announcement, the platform claimed an index of approximately 5.7 million active job listings, up to 400% more than some major mainstream job boards. The company positions this as access to the “hidden” 80% of the job market (roles not heavily promoted on advertising driven platforms), while actively filtering out ghost jobs, stale listings, agency reposts, and duplicates.
Alongside the funding, HiringCafe launched its free AI Talent Agent. Users upload a resume; the system parses skills, experience, and preferences, then continuously monitors the live index (Always-On 24/7) to surface matched roles as they appear. The agent is offered with no paywall or subscription for job seekers.
Co-founders are Ali Mir (ex software engineer at Meta, DoorDash, and Rippling) and Hamed Nilforoshan (Stanford CS PhD candidate focused on AI/data science, previously at Airbnb and Snapchat; advised by Stanford professor Jure Leskovec, who is also an early investor/advisor).
The company originated in 2022 when Mir left his job amid tech layoffs and compiled a spreadsheet of ~10,000 hard to find startup roles to help friends. The resource went viral on social media. Nilforoshan joined later (pausing or shifting from his PhD), and the pair evolved it into a full platform. Growth to over 2 million monthly active users occurred entirely organically, primarily through word of mouth and a dedicated Reddit community, with zero marketing spend.
The company is based in the San Francisco/Cupertino, California area and remains very early stage (reports indicate around 6 employees at the time of the raise), with open roles for founding engineers and recruiting leadership.
How will HiringCafe use the funds?
Proceeds will expand operations, further develop the AI Talent Agent and real time indexing capabilities, scale the platform, and reach more job seekers while keeping the core service free for candidates. The emphasis remains on product development for the candidate side of the market rather than employer advertising tools.
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Spark Capital General Partner Fraser Kelton (formerly Head of Product at OpenAI, involved in ChatGPT and DALL-E launches) highlighted the founders’ clear vision and organic traction: “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.”
The round ranks in the 96th percentile by size among all-time seed stage deals in the U.S. jobs and recruitment sector (based on a sample of ~2,000 rounds). Backing from angels at ZipRecruiter and Indeed signals interest in candidate centric, agentic AI approaches that challenge the traditional sponsored listing model of incumbent platforms.
HiringCafe’s thesis centers on structural misalignment in legacy job boards (LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.), which prioritize paid promotions and surface only a fraction of openings, creating hyper competition and burnout. By indexing the long tail directly and deploying always-on AI agents, the company aims to level access for everyday job seekers. Success will hinge on maintaining index freshness and accuracy, delivering highly relevant matches at scale, and sustaining a free candidate experience while building a viable long term business model.
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