Storied Silicon Valley VC company Andreessen Horowitz is supporting a fledgling British startup that is “redefining” how AI is used to match talent.

Dex is known as a startup, targeting candidates and companies with a variety of AI-driven recruitment intelligence, including docking and coaching, in an effort to improve long-term retention.

Dex is the handicraft work of CTO HARRY UGLOW and CEO Paddy Lambros (pictured above), who recently served as a software engineer and talent leader at European venture capital firm Atomico. Although they say DEX has attracted about twenty British tech companies to the ship (“including two high-profile British unicorns”), the platform is still in closed beta as they fine-tune things ahead of a wider launch later this year.

The London-based startup announced Tuesday that it had raised $3.1 million in a round of prepaid funding led by A16Z’s Speedrun Fund and concept business, and has been involved in many angels from a variety of technology and VC landscapes, including: Meta Board Member Charlie Songhurst; Deliveroo Coo Eric French; ISIOR.IO CEO Stephen Whitworth; Concept Capital Partner Kamil Mieczakowski; and former Atomico partner Bryce Keane.

Rent ground

As AI gets more and more intertwined in the recruitment space, Dex enters a busy space – which includes fledgling startups, well-funded unicorns and new AI Smarts that are directly integrated into LinkedIn. But DEX sees the gap in an omnipotent platform focused on lasers real Meet the candidates.

First, Dex (the company as the "AI Voice Talent Agent") communicates with candidates through appeals to understand their experience, skills, ambitions, and more. DEX can then help them plan their next career development; provide them with relevant opportunities; prepare them for interviews; and even negotiated offers they may receive.

It is worth noting that DEX will be very useful for passive candidates (i.e. those who are not actively looking for new jobs) as well as in hunting. For example, once DEX has established a candidate profile, it can keep the tag in a public place for advertising on the web (perhaps a very specific role in a very specific company) and serve alerts when such opportunities arise.

For those actively seeking new jobs, DEX can do the entire nine codes from search to app.

“DEX talks through what you want (your preferences and needs) and asks questions to gain insight into your experience and skills,” Lambros explained to TechCrunch. “Using this data, DEX then maps the entire market to find the best opportunity and surface it. If you want to keep going, DEX can handle the app – no longer have resumes, no more cover letters – when there are competitions, introduce you to the hiring manager.”

So, for candidates, DEX is less market or work committees, and more of AI agents, giving them all the mundane things.

"We don't think candidates want to trawl some generic job ads, so Dex searches for you, saving hours of scrolling, researching, and then managing," Lambros said.

After all, DEX can guide candidates for interviews and even provide market data on average pay for such roles, such as average pay.

Lambros said that in addition to relying on “large public data sets and thousands of interviews and call transcripts”, Dex spoke with more than 50 of the UK’s “most experienced recruitment leaders” to understand their recruitment methods and what they are looking for in their ideal candidates. All of this data ended up in DEX.

Under the hood, DEX is built on multiple LLM providers, including OpenAI, Google (Gemini) and Meta (Llama), and switches based on any improvements introduced by the respective models.

“We are constantly evaluating and changing providers to ensure we can benefit from the latest advancements,” Uglo said.

Meanwhile, on the company side, DEX talked with the recruitment team to build their preference for the ideal candidate.

“DEX spoke with hiring managers and candidates to gain a deep understanding of the very suitable look,” Uglo said. “The culture, behavior, needs, needs and ambitions of individuals and companies. Then combine it with a wide range of public data to power our recommendation system to curate personalized competitions.”

The company, with a $3.1 million bank, is now stepping up recruitment for engineering and marketing in an effort to launch publicly in the UK before seeking an international market.

“Recruiting is not about filling seats, it is about building lasting partnerships that benefit employees and the company,” Lambros said. “With this funding, we will help companies maintain top talent and empower employees to find jobs they love.”