Tezi is a San Francisco-based AI recruiting company founded by Raghavendra Prabhu and Jason James, both with deep backgrounds in technology and recruitment. Its flagship product, Max, is positioned as the first fully autonomous AI recruiter, an agent designed to own the heavy, repetitive parts of the hiring workflow rather than merely assist a human recruiter. The premise is straightforward but ambitious: a hiring team sets up a role once, and Max takes it from there, sourcing candidates, screening them, and coordinating scheduling so that qualified interviews begin appearing on the team's calendar within days.
Max operates across the top and middle of the recruiting funnel. It identifies and engages relevant candidates, evaluates fit, and manages the back-and-forth of scheduling, keeping the human team informed throughout. By automating these labor-intensive steps, Tezi aims to dramatically reduce the cost and time of hiring while improving the candidate experience through fast, consistent communication. The company also frames bias reduction as a benefit, since a structured, consistent autonomous process can mitigate some of the variability and subjectivity of manual screening.
Tezi's approach reflects a broader shift in the recruiting market from copilots that assist recruiters toward agents that autonomously execute end-to-end workflows. For lean talent teams and fast-scaling companies, an autonomous recruiter promises leverage that would otherwise require additional headcount.
Tezi raised $9M in seed funding in August 2024, led by 8VC and Audacious Ventures, with participation from Liquid 2, Afore, Prime Set, and South Park Commons, plus angel investors including the founding CEOs of Instacart and Thumbtack. The company is using the capital to advance Max and expand its operations as it builds toward fully autonomous recruiting.