Juicebox raises $80M Series B at $850M valuation to power passive AI recruiting for 5,000 companies

Stock Exchange. I like that we got Jeremy Aair in the in the vibr. I I I just noticed that. Anyway, without further ado, we have David from Juicebox. He's the co-founder and CEO. He's in the rear room and now he's in the TV Ultra Dome. How are you doing,

Private Holes? Welcome to the show.

The man of the hour.

Thanks for having me on again.

Thank you so much for coming back. back so soon.

Fantastic performance. Give us the news. What happened? How much you raised? Break it down for us.

Yeah. Um, we announced our $80 million series B today.

Congrats.

Oh, look at this. Look at this.

Oh, he's got a

He's got a baby gong.

He's got a mini one. He's got a baby.

Gong I've seen.

Sorry to gong m you, but uh

uh hopefully it's ringing off the hook.

We'll reach out after the show. And now that now that you're an $800 million company, we I think you deserve to have a gong.

Yes. Yes.

As big as you know.

Yeah. You need one. So, how is business? How is growth? What's the how big is the company? How big is the the the client base? Give us some context on the scale since we last talked.

For sure. So, some quick facts on the business. We we were four people uh just over a year ago. Um then when we raised the A, when we were on that

Yeah. we were uh 13 people um and then now we're around 40. Um we've tripled ARR since the A um and work with over 5,000 customers.

5,000 companies are recruiting employees through Juicebox. Uh how many people does is is does the talent pool matter? Does that stay static or is it more like I'm a company, I come to you and you go find the person wherever they are on the internet?

Yeah, it's a great question. It's the latter. So, um, what we focus on is passive talent sourcing. So, we'll scour the web for anyone that we can find that think is that we think could be a great fit for the given role. Um, we'll find that list of people, stack rank them for your given search, and then make it really easy to reach out to them typically through an email sequence, get in touch with them, and see if they're interested in the role. Uh, and so because our talent pool is effectively everyone, um, it scales quite nicely uh, with our customers as well.

5,000 companies are hiring. That's a white pill. While people are worried about layoffs and and contraction and you know companies going out of business and whatnot, uh what trends are you seeing among the 5,000 uh companies that you work with? Are they particularly early stage startups that are growing that you know you can speak the same language of? Are they in industrial sectors that are immune from AI or transformation? What trends are you seeing in the hiring market? Yeah, when we were on last um a lot of our customers were kind of venturebacked, fast growing in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. I'd say that's probably the biggest thing that's changed in the business since then is that we've scaled to um support more traditional enterprises. So think like large defense contractors, uh financial institutions and similar. Um they face the same hiring problems. They want to attract the best talent. Uh and they are seeing a lot of noise in the inbound that they used to quite heavily rely on. uh there's huge amounts of like AI generated application spam now and that makes it really hard to find the best talent and and bring them onto the team and so what we've seen since is kind of the shift what used to be quite heavy on just software engineering roles of doing outbound for them uh is really spreading across roles and so um that's for sales roles that's for HR roles finance roles and all across the board

so oh sorry

for uh I was just wondering uh do you expect there to be a shift in the number of new jobs that you place or broadly are placed that come from employees that are currently working somewhere and get outreach from a new company and then they shift while they're still employed versus the the the the proactive job searcher.

That's right. We think the majority of roles are going to be filled by passive candidates. um we call it the talent war and so the more companies are competing the more they're going to be reaching out to other top talent and try to attract them to their teams um and I think that's already been the case uh to some extent in you know fast growing tech uh that's now spreading across the industry and so we think all all roles are ultimately going to be filled through outbound

okay uh talk about the business model and how it might evolve in the future where is this where is this going I'm I'm assuming uh as part of the pitch. All the investors were excited about you selling kind of the work that traditional uh recruiting agencies do, but how how are you positioning it or thinking about it?

Yeah. So, one thing that's unique about the business is that um while we do kind of sell the work that the recruiter is doing, um we do so without um kind of say replacing the traditional recruiting agency. In fact, many of them are our customers as well. And so whether it's an in-house recruiting team or an external recruiting team, they have the same goal of uh identifying who could be the best person of for a given role and then reaching out to them. And so the the platform has two different modules which kind of goes into the business model and pricing as well. One being the per seat setup where you can buy a license to use the platform and you log in with your email. The second being our agents which are used on a per job basis. And so depending on how many jobs you have live or jobs that you want to hunt talent for, you can deploy different agents in Juicebox that will go find the best profiles and reach out to them every single day without you having to check back in on them day over day.

Okay. Give me some tips for someone who wants to be flooded with Juicebox inbound. What what what's the key to making yourself aware to your web crawlers to the models? How should people be positioning themselves? PDF resumes, personal websites, blogs, Twitter, like what's the best way to throw up a flag? Even if you're happy with your current job, just let everyone know. Let the models know. Let Juicebox know. I'm amaz I'm I'm a I'm a I'm a killer.

Yeah. Um, I think the biggest piece of advice is just share more about yourself. Share what you're where you're currently working, what you're actually working on, um, any projects that you're involved in, anything you do outside of work. Um, really anything that can indicate um, a potential match for for role, and that can be pretty diverse. You know, there's many companies that um, want to find candidates that have some kind of interest or experience in the sector that they work in. Uh, that might not directly be tied to the day-to-day work that you're doing today, but may reflect an interest that you have. And so the more of that is available or or published in one form or another will make it easier to be matched and identified for that job.

What's the best output for that? Because I imagine you're not scraping all of Instagram reels. It's probably a little bit easier if I have like a blog that's well indexed or I'm on GitHub or LinkedIn like where where should someone be publishing?

Yeah, that's exactly right. Um so actually all the ones you mentioned are great examples. um personal websites is something that's still a bit newer. I'd say like the um total kind of number of candidates that actually have that is still fairly low. Um but you know many people have a GitHub profile, LinkedIn profile um many places to to to publish that information and um I think GitHub in particular is one that's quite underutilized because it's historically been hard for recruiters to use like how can they actually find uh you know who is a good person to reach out to. Um a lot of that data is indexed a lot stronger now and so recruiters are searching based on GitHub data. they are finding people who contribute to open source repos or or have other signals. Um, and a lot of that data is only being unlocked within the last six to 12 months.

I have a funny story. In like 2014, I needed to hire a software engineer. So, I cross referenced every customer email with GitHub and I and I reached out to like some of the top uh open source contributors and there's this one guy who had created Reddus which is an in-memory database. He's like a legendary programmer and I was like, "Hey, can you help me? I need to build an e-commerce website. And he was like, you you don't need me, bro. Like, you're good. He was actually very helpful and taught me a ton of things. But that cross referencing has been really really valuable. Uh and and GitHub continues to be an underrated source of of of sourcing. I remember I talked to someone who's a tech recruiter and I taught her how to source on LinkedIn and she actually got a job because of it because it was like a differentiator that she wouldn't just be hanging out on LinkedIn all the time. This was like pretty early in GitHub's uh era. Uh but there's so much alpha there because you can see what people are doing. Uh little bit harder if you're a defense contractor. Probably not posting a lot of public information about what you're doing, but maybe maybe some blog posts will do the trick.

Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come with us.

Congratulations to the progress and we'll talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. And let me also tell you about turbo power. Jordy,

please do.

Serless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely