San Francisco-based start-up Juicebox, creator of the AI-driven hiring engine PeopleGPT, has secured $30 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital, bringing its total funding to $36 million. The investment marks strong validation for the two-year-old company, which has quickly become a trusted tool for modern recruitment.

Founded by David Paffenholz and Ishan Gupta, Juicebox leverages large language models to identify talent beyond traditional keyword searches. Unlike legacy systems, PeopleGPT infers candidate details across professional profiles, websites, and public data, surfacing hidden talent often missed by conventional methods.

Since launching in late 2023, Juicebox has been adopted by over 2,500 companies, including Cognition, Ramp, and Perplexity, and crossed $10 million in annual recurring revenue within its first year. Remarkably, the company achieved this growth with a lean team and no dedicated salesforce, relying on word-of-mouth and customer referrals.

Sequoia’s David Cahn highlighted Juicebox’s rapid adoption, noting it could become the default recruitment platform for start-ups, much like Stripe did for payments. With new capital, Juicebox aims to scale engineering and product development to meet surging demand in AI-driven hiring.