Benjamin Entz's path to becoming an entrepreneur was long and unconventional.
Entz worked as an R&D engineer at FX companies Industrial Light & Magic and DreamWorks on films like “Transformers” and “How to Train Your Dragon,” before leaving the film industry in 2012 to join venture capital firm Social Capital as engineer in residence, where he co-founded Choir, an iOS mental health app. A few years later, Entz joined construction productivity software startup PlanGrid as director of engineering, responsible for leading and managing the company's core programming projects.
At Plangrid, much of Entz's time was spent on recruiting, Entz said. That's when he learned of problems with the recruiting process. “The industry went from companies that were rapidly growing staff to suddenly companies looking to reduce staffing, changing the dynamics of the talent market and how talent acquisition teams needed to adapt,” Entz told TechCrunch. “The pain is being felt all the way to the top, with executives citing talent as a top topic and creating anxiety.”
To address this pain point, Entz and Avik Pramanik, an engineer he met at PlanGrid, launched Ashby, a platform that integrates existing talent acquisition tools and leverages AI heavily to automate repetitive steps in the recruiting pipeline. Ashby helps with creating job listings, finding candidates, and sending calendar invites for interviews, while also providing stakeholders with a dashboard with real-time recruiting metrics.
“As hiring managers and leadership team members ourselves, we know how difficult it has historically been for employees outside of the recruiting team to have a positive experience with an applicant tracking system (ATS),” Entz said. “Ashby was built with all stakeholders in mind because we believe talent is the most important element a company must align on to thrive.”
One of Ashby's AI features, AI-generated filters for candidate search, allows recruiters to describe in plain language what kind of candidates they're looking for in their applicant database (e.g., “candidates with Python skills hired this year who aren't via referrals”) and let Ashby create the filter logic and Boolean values needed for the search query.
Ashby can also insert AI-generated personalized copy based on job postings and candidate resumes into outreach emails, and automatically classify candidate email replies as “interested” or “not interested.” Additionally, the platform can compile interview feedback collected throughout the hiring process into a report for recruiters, with individual interview feedback quoted in the highlights.
What if the AI makes a mistake (and AI is prone to making mistakes)? Encz points out that the output can be tweaked or adjusted, and there is human review built into each workflow.
“We see the opportunity in AI as aligned with our general focus on product velocity and quality,” Encz says. “Our biggest differentiation centers around the quality and accessibility of data for talent teams, the connectedness of workflows that come from systems built on a single platform rather than multiple point solutions, and the quality of the customer experience.”
Ashby's ATS platform can integrate data from your existing recruiting and recruiting tools and add a layer of generative AI on top of it. Image Credit: AshbyImage Credit: Ashby
Since emerging from stealth mode in September 2022, Ashby's customer base has expanded to more than 1,300 brands, including Quora, Ironclad, Vanta, Reddit and Lemonade. Revenue has grown sixfold, with Encz saying Ashby makes the majority of its money from a base subscription and additional fees for more advanced scheduling and analytics tools.
Investors seem pleased with those numbers: This week, Ashby closed a $30 million Series C round led by Lachie Groom, with participation from tech entrepreneur Elad Gill, F-Prime, and Y Combinator, bringing Ashby's total funding to $70 million.
Entz described the Series C as a “solid upround” from the Series B.
“We've seen very strong growth over the past two years, with increasing growth rates among both startups and enterprise customers, so now is the ideal time to double down on investment in further product development and go-to-market,” he added. “This additional funding gives us many years of growth and more options.”
One option is expansion: Ashby plans to add about 50 jobs by the end of the year to its team of about 100 people based in its San Francisco headquarters.