Paraform raises $40M to build a universal agentic hiring platform beyond tech into legal and defense

you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And we'll bring in our next guest, John Kim from Parform. How are you doing, John?

Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Please introduce yourself and the company.

Hey guys, u one of the founders and CEO of Parform. Uh, we are a aentic hiring platform that makes hiring exceptional talent as easy as pressing a button.

I love it.

So, our first product,

we got we got your button in the mail. We did.

We got your button. We got a package from you guys.

It was very well recorded.

It was a great great execution. The only issue is the chocolate completely exploded everywhere over the

It made it way more memorable, honestly. Maybe.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I will never forget.

Maybe there's alpha. There's deep alpha there. Anyway,

but no, it was awesome. Tell me uh so who is the customer? Who's paying for this? Is it is it large corporations, small companies, startups or do you have the applicant pay sometimes? H how does the business model work?

Yeah. Yeah. So it's the companies paying. Um we started out helping startups uh you know build their founding teams. Now we have sort of SMB mid-market enterprise. So you know everyone from like a fast growing startup all the way to like public companies like Palunteer are our customers. Yeah.

Wow.

And and you raised some money. How did it come together?

Yeah. Um, yeah, we raised a $40 million round uh led by Scale Venture Partners. Um, I need to wait for the

congratulations. And

yeah.

Yeah. And and and uh help me understand how you're going to deploy capital to accelerate at this particular moment in time because uh I imagine that actually building the platform has gotten easier but engineers are still expensive. You still have to do top of funnel work. There's SDRs to hire. How are you thinking the shape of the business evolves over the next uh 12 to 18 months?

Yeah. No, definitely. I mean, um, might be just like a classic answer, but, you know, we, you know, obviously, uh, want to continue to, you know, do best-in-class growth. Um, we grew a ton, 10x our revenue last year, and we want to continue to grow,

uh, you know, at a

at a fast pace. So, in order to do that, you know, we need to grow our team and, you know, all that stuff. Uh, but and also accelerate our product roadmap, right? Um, I think in particular, I'm personally spending a lot of time this year, uh, you know, really just narrowing down, focusing on our product road map. So, yeah.

Uh, One more thing I will mention is uh we uh we sort of started in tech and helping tech companies hire you know EPD talent, sales, design, you name it. Uh actually we launched a new vertical so we're uh helping law firms hire as well. Um you know our goal is to be a universal hiring platform not just for tech companies. So obviously deploying capital uh going across industries as well. Yeah. Talk to me about the legal hiring market. Like like are you sourcing those people in a different place? Like what's different about that that requires investment and changing the and generalizing the platform? Uh

yeah.

Yeah. Walk me through that.

Yeah. I mean since we're a recruiter uh marketplace um you know in order to scale to another industry we basically need a sort of a new set of supply uh like legal recruiters. Um you know actually a lot of lateral attorney and partner hiring at law firms are driven by uh recruiting agencies. So the like boutique you know sort of heavy hitters like who do all the recruiting. So yeah I guess uh to expand we need a new set of supply. Um so we're we're doing that. Yeah.

How are you thinking about uh just areas of growth in the US economy broadly? If you stack rank like there's a lot of energy around re-industrialization right now. Uh we were hearing that uh electricians might be the LeBron James of the next era. Uh but that feels like I don't I don't know that electricians are uh on the internet the same way that software engineers are where they might have public GitHub profiles, blogs, uh LinkedIn profiles. Uh how are you thinking about solving those next verticals?

Yeah. No, I think like um definitely like defense and government seems to be a huge area of growth. Um yeah, like you said, uh manufacturing, like anything that's sort of like Adams, uh not bits, I think is like sort of also going to grow a ton. Um I actually think like travel, entertainment, like those industries, media, um you know, uh is going to do well as well. Uh so yeah, we're looking at what sort of verticals to go after like to your point based on what what you know, what we think are exciting. Um I also read the anthropic report where they published sort of like what jobs are going to be like sort of replaced by AI, all that stuff. Oh yeah, that spider chart and then Andre Karpathy posted something similar.

Yeah, I mean I I think actually like you know my point of view is that the economy is not like a zero sum game like it's actually like an abundance game. So I actually you know I'm not too worried about like AI like replacing people. I mean like sure there's some like adjustment on like how we need to upscale ourselves and differentiate but I think every technological revolution like humans figured out a way. Well, I mean that's the interesting thing about that chart is that what's missing from that chart of things jobs that will go away is like the new jobs that will be created like live stream business technology news was not a thing when I was a kid. I there's zero chance that I ever could have put that down as like my future career will be live streamer. That wasn't a thing. What uh in in conversations with investors for this round, what were you like what kind of exits like were kind of referenced in the in the recruiting space? I know there's like public

Oh yeah.

recruiting firms like you know these these companies scale to like massive massive revenue.

You know they're they're not No, I'm talking about like non- tech companies that are just like we do staffing and recruiting in different kind of vertical but there's massive massive companies in the space. Are you comping to those and saying like, hey, we there's we can be a billion dollar business

uh just based on serving a a similar kind of uh sector.

Yeah, I I think um not I'm I'm not too sure if that was like the focal point of all the conversations, but I think it's a great question nonetheless. Like I think

Well, yeah, and I just I just say that because there hasn't been like

like every company has to hire a bunch of people, but there's not like the the

the face recruiting. There's nothing that like there there's not like a perfect comp where Figma's like, "Well, look, you have Adobe, so we're just going to like eat some percentage of Adobe."

Yeah. I think the way I look at it is if you look at the total amount of like dollars spent on recruiting, broadly speaking, like where does it go to? And actually, um the biggest spend category is uh external recruiting. So outsourcing, recruiting, working with recruiting agencies, staffing agencies. So like that's uh sort of the biggest spend. But actually if you look at traditional like VC dollars over the last 10 20 years it all went to like HR software or recruiting software and that category is actually not that big. It's like maybe 10 billion. I I'm not sure exactly but it's not the biggest category yet. 90% of VC dollars went in there. So I think there's a little bit of a you know I think mismatch there. But um obviously the market we're going after is um you know like you know labor market itself right. I think um I've heard somewhere also like we're shifting from paying for like software to paying for work and instead of sort of building paying for tools, we're paying for outcomes and I think paraphform uh is like very much aligned with that trend. Uh so yeah, we're going after the biggest market in recruiting. Yeah.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the new round. Great to get good luck.

Great to talk to you soon.

Great to see you, John. Have a good one.