Humanly raises $25M to put AI to work for job seekers, not just the companies hiring them

The market for recruiting software — tools that help companies find and screen candidates — is worth $14 billion. The market for actually placing people in jobs is worth $500 billion. 

Humanly just raised $25 million to chase the bigger number.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based company, which makes AI-powered interviewing tools for employers, is using its new Series B funding to reposition itself as what CEO Prem Kumar calls a “service-as-a-software” company — one that doesn’t just give recruiters tools to find candidates, but delivers pre-vetted, ready-to-hire job seekers on demand. It’s less recruiting software, more staffing agency replacement.

The round included participation from SEEK Investments, Drive Capital, Zeal Capital Partners, Converge and others. Humanly has raised $52 million to date.

“I wouldn’t call it pivoting, but we’re reinventing ourselves,” Kumar said. “Instead of a tool to go out and find profiles of job seekers, we’re just giving you the candidate themselves.”

The goal is to build a continuously refreshed database of pre-interviewed job seekers, essentially like LinkedIn’s profile network, but everyone in it has already been vetted and is ready to place.

Founded in 2018, Humanly uses automation software to help companies screen job candidates, schedule interviews, automate initial communication, run reference checks, and more. It targets customers with high volume hiring needs.

Humanly is also launching a job seeker-facing product, offering AI-powered coaching on interview preparation, resume writing, and salary negotiation — giving the company a direct relationship with candidates rather than relying solely on employer clients to funnel people into its system.

The timing may be working in Humanly’s favor. A difficult job market means more applicants chasing fewer openings, which Kumar says only amplifies the problem his company is trying to solve. AI-powered application tools have made it easier than ever for candidates to blast out applications en masse, turning virtually every open role into a high-volume hiring event. That puts more pressure on employers to filter smarter — and faster.

To build out its candidate database at scale, Humanly struck a partnership with CareerBuilder, taking over what the jobs giant calls its “talent marketplace” — a destination where job seekers go to find work and access training. The deal gives Humanly, which is currently conducting around 9,000 interviews per day, direct access to an estimated 20 million job seekers over the next 12 months.

Humanly is also working with Microsoft on its neurodiversity hiring program, using AI to help neurodiverse candidates practice for technical and behavioral interviews in a structured, low-pressure environment. The partnership addresses a gap Kumar says traditional hiring processes often miss — that interview performance frequently measures communication under pressure rather than actual capability.

Through the program, candidates use Humanly’s AI avatar coach to practice explaining their thinking, walking through trade-offs, and building confidence before facing a real interviewer. Kumar has ADHD and his son was recently diagnosed, and he said the tool may also help reduce a subtler problem.

“We have a lot of data around some of the bias in human interviews,” Kumar said. “We feel an AI interviewer, interviewing someone neurodiverse, might bias against them less than humans in some cases.”

Humanly, which is No. 152 on the GeekWire 200 ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups, counts Microsoft, Domino’s, Massage Envy, Worldwide Flight Services, and MGM Resorts and Casinos among its more than 120 customers. Kumar said the company’s revenue has grown 3.9 times over the past seven months and the startup now employs about 50 people.

Overall, Kumar sees Humanly’s shift as bigger than just its own reinvention — it’s a fundamental change in what enterprise software can now deliver.

“You no longer need to hire a big team to run a bunch of tools to get the outcome,” he said. “The tools can begin to do that themselves.”