Hire on Easy Mode: Announcing our Investment in Paraform

Ask any founder what their hardest problem is and you'll hear the same answer: finding great people—especially now, when the roles that matter most are ones that barely existed three years ago. Try hiring an AI engineer, a Forward Deployed Engineer, or a designer who's actually shipped AI products. The talent pool is smaller than you expect, the signal is weak, and everyone is competing for the same candidates.

And AI has made finding great candidates much harder. Inboxes are flooded with AI-generated applications and outreach. The noise has gone way up and the signal has gone down. Hiring managers are spending more time than ever sifting through everything to find the one person who's actually a fit.

This is the problem Paraform was built to solve – and why we're proud to share that we’re leading Paraform's Series B round.

Paraform is an agentic hiring platform. Their first product is a AI-powered recruiter marketplace where companies post their hardest-to-hire roles and get matched with expert recruiters who have a proven track record filling exactly those kinds of positions. Recruiters get access to roles at top companies they couldn't reach on their own, plus AI-powered tools (sourcing, CRM, scheduling, candidate matching) that let them focus on what actually matters: the people.

The platform learns what ‘great’ looks like for each role: what’s actually required, what’s a dealbreaker, what ‘senior’ means in practice. It then uses interview feedback to continuously improve matching, delivering candidates worth meeting, intros that convert, and hires that happen fast.

Companies rely on Paraform. Palantir, Rippling, Decagon, Abridge, Cognition, Owner, Basis, Thompson Reuters, Avis, Wilson Sonsini, and hundreds more use it to fill their most critical roles. Decagon hired a founding engineer and GTM lead in 27 days. Windsurf hired 7 engineers in under two months. Across the platform, 70% of submitted candidates get interviews and companies hire 3x faster than their baseline.

On the recruiter side, the value proposition is just as strong. Paraform handles business development, client communications, follow-ups, and payments. Recruiters show up and do what they do best: recruit. They get access to roles at companies they'd never land on their own, AI tools that make them faster, and they earn more than they would working independently. 

Recruiting is a massive market. Companies spend tens of billions on third-party hiring every year, and most of it still runs through fragmented, old-school channels. Paraform is building the platform that becomes the default way hiring gets done—not just in tech, but everywhere. They start with the hardest problem: the critical roles no one else can fill, where specialized recruiters and AI agents work together to move faster and smarter than anything on the market. Every search, every hire compounds into the intelligence layer for what they're ultimately building: an all-in-one agentic hiring platform that covers every role, every workflow, for any company.

We were excited about Paraform from the first meeting. Part of it was the product and the numbers, but a bigger part is John and Jeff themselves. Their origin story is one of my favorites: they each tried to recruit the other to come build a company with them, and after enough of that back and forth, they figured they might as well just build one together. Now they're roommates and co-founders. If that's not founder chemistry, I don't know what is.

What makes them special is that they wake up every day thinking about how to make Paraform better for everyone on the platform: from the companies finding talent to the recruiters doing the work and the candidates going through the process. That kind of care is rare, and it's why the product feels the way it does. They're building something where everyone wins, and they're doing it with a level of energy and thoughtfulness that made us want to be a part of it.

If you're a founder hiring for roles that matter, talk to the Paraform team. If you're a recruiter who wants access to better roles and better tools, join the platform. And if you're an operator who wants to build the future of hiring, Paraform is (always) hiring too.