Jooba, a startup founded by an Armenian entrepreneur, has raised $4 million from a16z Speedrun.

American startup Jooba, founded by Mark Benliyan, an Armenian diaspora native, has raised $4 million in seed funding. The company helps fast-growing startups hire employees using AI agents and live recruiters.

The round included participation from a16z speedrun, Andreessen Horowitz's fund program for early-stage startups, as well as Scribble Ventures and Genius Ventures funds and business angels. At the same time as the round announcement, the service became available to all companies.

Jooba operates as an embedded hiring partner. For each job opening, the team creates a separate AI agent that takes into account technical requirements and company culture. The agent searches for suitable candidates among millions of profiles. Then, Jooba specialists manually review the list, and only after that do they send messages to candidates on behalf of the founder or hiring manager. Selected candidates are added to a separate Slack channel where the company conducts assessments and schedules interviews.

Clients pay a fixed subscription fee instead of a percentage for each hired employee. This is the main difference from traditional agencies, which charge startups from $30,000 to $50,000 per specialist. Jooba claims that their clients hire employees 50% faster and pay 90% less. The first suitable candidate appears within 22 hours after the initial call.

Mark Benliyan grew up in Glendale, California, and graduated from the UCLA Computer Science department in two years, at the age of 19. Before Jooba, he developed products at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Netflix, Tinder, and Figma. He then left Figma to study the inner workings of a large recruiting agency from the inside. Jooba completed the fifth cohort of a16z speedrun and has already helped over 100 companies with hiring.

Source: Mark Benliyan