Using AI to Recruit AI Talent: Chinese-American Woman Secures $10 Million in Funding
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In January of this year, Nancy Xu left her doctoral position at Stanford University, where she was researching foundational models, to establish her AI recruitment company, Moonhub. Today, leading AI startups like Anthropic and Inflection are using Moonhub to find and hire talent.
Moonhub's AI chatbot, trained on a dataset of 1 billion candidate profiles, is assisting recruitment managers at AI unicorns such as Anthropic and Inflection in identifying and hiring employees.
In August, Tony Zavala was hired by unicorn company Inflection as an AI language specialist to enhance the performance of their conversational chatbot, Pi. At the time, Zavala, a former computational linguist at LinkedIn, wasn't actively seeking a job. Thanks to the AI agent developed by San Francisco-based startup Moonhub, he was discovered and recruited.
A human recruiter provided the AI tool with criteria such as 'experience working with products like ChatGPT' and 'technical experience at top-tier tech companies,' which led to Zavala's profile surfacing. Before Moonhub's human recruiter reached out to him, Zavala admitted he wasn't 'particularly familiar' with Inflection or the job opening, having only heard of the company in passing.
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The company announced on Wednesday that it has secured $10 million in seed funding from venture capital firms Khosla Ventures and GV, with additional investments from Time Ventures, Day One Ventures, and angel investors including Susan Wojcicki (former CEO of YouTube) and Mike Volpi (General Partner at Index Ventures). Nancy revealed that within its first year of operation, the startup has already generated over $1 million in revenue. The funding will be used to improve its AI products and expand the team.
"At Anthropic and Inflection, we were one of their earliest talent partners," Nancy told Forbes. "In fact, we were working with Anthropic before they even had their own in-house recruiters."
Recruiters can use Moonhub's conversational chatbot by providing context such as job descriptions and company information to identify hundreds of relevant candidates. They can also add specific prompts, such as "show me Ivy League graduates based in the Bay Area," and find individuals who have worked at similar companies or with similar technologies. Many companies leverage Moonhub's recruitment services to hire for white-collar roles like data scientists, software engineers, and marketing managers. However, Moonhub's clientele isn't limited to tech companies. Nancy noted that their customers also include elderly care provider LifeWorx, electric boat manufacturer Navier, and parking space provider Diamond Parking.
Moonhub's AI recruitment tool is trained on a database of over 1 billion public profiles sourced from platforms like LinkedIn, Upwork, GitHub, Google Scholar, Overflow, StackOverflow, and Twitter. The company uses its own internal large language models, as well as models developed by OpenAI, Cohere, and Anthropic, to create its conversational recruitment agent. Nancy highlighted their patented "custom retrieval-augmented generation framework," which enhances the chatbot's response quality by rapidly processing additional information, such as knowledge from domain experts, rather than relying solely on generic large language models.
Currently, Moonhub's human recruiters handle outreach to potential candidates, scheduling interviews, and managing the hiring process. However, Nancy said AI will soon take over all tasks except interviews. The use of AI in candidate sourcing and screening may introduce biases and potentially exclude or discriminate against candidates from certain backgrounds. Nancy emphasized that her startup is working to make its AI recruitment tools fairer by allowing employers to review diverse candidate profiles and diversifying the data used to train its models.
She added that Moonhub offers a modern AI alternative for startups that outsource recruitment, as traditional outsourcing is often costly and time-consuming. "Many companies that aren't inherently AI-native are turning to Moonhub as a way to become AI-native," said Nancy, who also runs her own venture capital firm, Nancy Ventures.
Before founding Moonhub, Nancy earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, where she conducted research on foundational models at the Stanford AI Lab, building AI agents for various applications, including customer support. She also ran a recruitment company, where she experienced firsthand the difficulties of finding qualified candidates quickly—a challenge that ultimately led her to establish the startup Moonhub. In September of this year, Nancy was named one of TIME's inaugural 100 Most Influential People in AI.
"For many, the 'aha moment' with Moonhub is realizing they can relax on a Friday night, watch Netflix, chat with AI, and discover 50 candidates they genuinely like—all within five minutes," Nancy said.