HireBound has raised $2 million in a seed funding round led by Kalaari Capital, as the AI recruiting startup seeks to automate the entire hiring process through agent-driven technology.
Antler, Infinyte Club and CareerNet also participated in the round. The company said it will use the capital to accelerate product development, expand its go-to-market teams and scale internationally, targeting a fivefold increase in annual recurring revenue over the next 12 to 18 months.
The funding comes amid a broader shift towards AI-led automation across knowledge industries. Recruitment, long reliant on manual screening, fragmented tools and applicant tracking systems (ATS), is increasingly being reimagined as an AI-executed workflow rather than an administrative process.
HireBound positions itself as an execution layer rather than a record-keeping system. Unlike traditional ATS platforms, which primarily store applicant data, the company’s “agentic AI” is designed to autonomously manage sourcing, engagement, screening, evaluation and candidate recommendations.
According to the company, its platform has powered more than 3 million candidate conversations. It has been trained on over 2 million resumes and 30,000 job descriptions, with the aim of delivering interview-ready candidates while reducing recruiter workload.
Sharad Vij, Co-founder of HireBound, said recruitment remains “manual, fragmented and slow”, arguing that legacy systems are “systems of record, not systems of action”. He said the fresh capital would allow the company to deepen its AI research and development and expand globally.
Co-founder Kumar Vikramaditya added that the company is building AI agents capable of handling “high-context and high-touchpoint tasks” across sourcing and evaluation, while continuously learning from hiring signals and feedback loops. The longer-term goal, he said, is to create systems that can operate across roles and geographies with minimal human intervention.
The funding will be deployed across three priorities. On the product side, HireBound plans to enhance its AI engine to autonomously manage larger portions of the recruitment lifecycle, deepen integrations with ATS and HRMS platforms, and strengthen hiring analytics.
Commercially, it intends to expand sales, delivery and customer success teams to support staffing firms and enterprise clients across SaaS and managed hiring models. The company will also recruit across engineering, AI/ML and operations.
Jayraj Bharat Patel, AVP at Kalaari Capital, said the firm views HireBound as addressing a structural gap in high-velocity and multi-location hiring. He described its architecture as an “execution layer” built for modern recruiting teams.
HireBound currently operates with a 15-member team spanning product, AI/ML, engineering, delivery and go-to-market functions. It reports traction among staffing firms and enterprise talent teams and plans to deepen its international footprint over the next 12 to 24 months, adapting to regional compliance and hiring regulations.
As enterprises confront shifting skill demands and distributed workforces, the battle in HR technology is moving from tracking applicants to automating decisions. HireBound’s wager is that AI agents — not recruiters — will handle operational execution, leaving human teams to focus on strategy and relationships. Whether enterprises are ready to relinquish that control may determine how quickly that vision becomes mainstream.