Ashby, a startup which has built an AI-powered platform designed to help businesses manage their recruitment processes more efficiently, has raised $50 million in a Series D funding round.
This funding round was led by Mark McLaughlin at Alkeon with co-lead support from existing investor Lachy Groom and participation from F-Prime, Elad Gil, Gaingels, and other new and returning backers.
Ashby says it more than doubled its customer base over the past year, and saw its ARR increase by 135%. The startup also has several high-profile customers including Ramp, OpenAI, Harvey.ai, Notion, Cursor, Shopify, and Snowflake.
“We’re becoming a default for startups and for the midmarket,” said CEO and co-founder Benji Encz. “The vast majority of our growth has been word of mouth.” Ashby’s enterprise segment is growing as well — 123% year over year. The latest funding round comes a year after the company raised $30 million in a Series D round. According to Crunchbase, Ashby declined to reveal its valuation.
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Encz claims the company still has the “vast majority” of its Series C left in the bank. “Our burn multiple has been below one for all of this year,” he told Crunchbase. “We got preemptive interest on strong terms and since there are a number of years we’re going to invest before turning profitable, we felt it was a good time to add to the cash balance.” He also added the additional $50 million “puts us in a much more comfortable position.”
At the core of Ashby’s offering is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), which manages all of the interactions of applications for any given company, down to extending offers. In addition, its software also has a CRM to help companies discover talent, a scheduling tool that allows applicants to self-schedule; and pipeline analytics and sourcing via LLM-powered search.
Ashby’s software can do various tasks like posting job openings on platforms outside of a company’s website, asking questions in job postings “to get signals from a candidate,” and personalizing outreach in sourcing. Ashby states it would use its latest funding to invest in the most powerful, compliant, and thoughtful AI capabilities in the market and the fastest evolving product in Talent Acquisition tech.
Mark McLaughlin, general partner at Alkeon Capital said about Ashby, “The world is entering a new infrastructure cycle. Every system that companies rely on — CRM, ERP, finance, security, and yes, hiring — is being rebuilt with AI at the core. We believe Ashby is the clear candidate to own not just the traditional ATS swim lane but also, and more importantly, the expanded footprint of what a modern talent OS can be.”