According to some of the latest statistics, employers are inundated with job applications. According to the Institute of Student Employers, in the UK alone, employers running graduate training programs received an average of 140 applications for each job in 2024, 59% more than in 2023. And despite some trepidations among some recruiters, many companies are turning to artificial intelligence platforms to provide assistance, especially considering that the Gen Z generation has now outnumbered even the Millennial population.
No doubt this was a factor in the news that Maki, which has a conversational and skills-assessment-based AI agent for job interviews and candidate filtering, has now raised a 28-year Series A funding round. $.6 million led by the UK’s Blossom Capital. DST Global and existing investors Frst, GFC and Picus Capital also participated. It had previously raised 11 million euros in previous funding rounds. The money will be used to accelerate the product roadmap, expand into the US and expand the team.
Founded in 2022 by Maxime Legardez, Paul-Louis Caylar and Benjamin Chino, Maki’s platform interviews candidates via voice, video or text. The company says it has seen growth of more than 300% in 2024, having secured hiring contracts in more than 50 markets with companies including H&M, BNP Paribas, PwC, Deloitte, FIFA, Abercrombie and Capgemini. It also claims that its platform can streamline hiring, create a better experience for candidates and reduce employee turnover.
Maki’s AI-powered agents converse with potential candidates in natural language and, the company says, can automate the process by 80%, resulting in a 3x reduction in time to hire.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Maxime Legardez, CEO of Maki, said: “We use artificial intelligence to create agents that our customers can customize based on their needs and basically agents to replicate the tasks performed by humans in the recruitment. Our agents can source, select, schedule and interview candidates.
He said the agent created for clothing giant H&M is called Maria. It can call candidates on the phone or act as a visual avatar during a video call: “We have a built-in avatar with Synthesia, so it’s a very visual experience. It can speak 24/7 with candidates in multiple languages and have five, 10 or 15 minute conversations with candidates to evaluate hundreds of skills,” Legardez said.
He added that the AI is capable of assessing, among other things, the candidate’s empathy, collaboration or resilience with the customer.
However, if this seems impersonal, it is far from the case, especially considering the number of candidates he has to interact with, Legardez said: “If a candidate is rejected, he receives personalized feedback, with some suggestions for learning new things that they help improve their chances next time, thus also making them good brand ambassadors.” He said: “98% of candidates for BNP Paribas now say this is the best recruitment process of their life and increases their willingness.” to join BNP Paribas”.
Furthermore, despite this being the so-called era of the death of DEI, Legardez said that Maki exhibits far less bias than humans: “We have been audited by the state of New York, and our AI has been shown to create less bias than to a human being towards ethnicity, gender and age, and the more data we have, the better we can calibrate and pre-train them.” Who knows, maybe AI recruiting will lead to an even more diverse workforce in the future?
Maki’s competitors include companies like SHL, EON, Pymetrics, Saville, Recruit CRM, BrainTrust, Recruitee, Manatal, and many more.
However, Legardez says Maki sells less traditional HR software as much as it “works through our agents, automating the work of humans.”
Legardez previously built Everoad, a digital forwarder, which was acquired by Sennder.
In a statement, Ophelia Brown, managing partner at Blossom Capital, said: “We believe that Maki Agents have the potential to enable large organizations to achieve the next level of efficiency and decision making, redefining the way human resources drive business success.”
Maki’s fundraiser is definitely trending. Today, LinkedIn released a new AI product, Jobs Match, that provides instant advice on whether to apply for a particular job position.
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