Recruiting’s never been broken, it’s just been gatekept, overpriced, and wrapped in enough red tape to make the DMV look like a SaaS unicorn. But when tech layoffs hit and headhunters got ghosted, John Kim and Jeffrey Li didn’t just sit on the sidelines watching resumes rot. They built Paraform, a high-octane recruiter marketplace straight out of San Francisco’s wild-type DNA, designed to bring the best recruiters off the bench and back into the game, this time with AI in their corner and real skin in the bounty.
Let’s talk facts. Founded in 2022, Paraform isn’t some résumé upload site wrapped in enterprise-speak. It’s a platform that actually respects recruiter talent and pays like it. Thousands of elite recruiters, over 200 companies served, eight figures in ARR, and one recruiter walking away with $140K+ in rewards. One’s on pace to clear a million. This isn’t LinkedIn spam roulette, it’s a precision system where hiring happens fast, costs drop by 90%, and time-to-hire falls 5x. No retainers. No black-box search firms. Just real outcomes, real fast.
And now? They just landed $20 million in Series A funding, led by Felicis, with support from A*, BOND, DST Global, Liquid 2 Ventures, and a murderers’ row of angel investors from Canva, Instacart, YouTube, and xAI. Add in operators like Shyam Sankar, Harley Finkelstein, and Mark Pincus, and you get the picture. This isn’t a hobby fundraise. This is belief at institutional scale. Total raised: $25M. Fuel in the tank to scale the recruiter network, double down on AI product, and keep cracking the code for critical hires across startups and the Fortune few.
This isn’t about replacing recruiters with robots. It’s about giving them a supercharger. With call transcriptions, pipeline dashboards, AI outreach, and a Chrome extension that turns LinkedIn into a surgical instrument, Paraform puts power tools in human hands. The difference? It works. Because John Kim, who previously built and sold RulerNetwork, and Jeffrey Li, who coded at Cruise, launched Covaid, and ran an NFT project that didn’t implode, know the difference between flashy and functional. And they built Paraform for the operators who do too.
From placing critical hires at Palantir, Scale AI, and Ramp to partnering with LinkedIn Recruiter and Greenhouse, Paraform isn’t chasing market share, it’s redefining the market. A $700B global recruitment industry that’s been hiding behind process and pedigree just got put on notice.
Recruiting isn’t dying. It’s evolving. And Paraform is making sure the real ones get paid, companies get the hires they actually need, and the rest of the system can catch up or get left behind.
