Helio AI just secured a fresh $1M seed round, and the timing could not be sharper. SABAH.fund led the charge, with DOMiNO Ventures, Axiom, Tetrad VC, and angel investor Bas Godska stepping in, and the move feels like a quiet handshake between people who know exactly where the next wave of operational efficiency is about to erupt. The recruitment world has been begging for a system that does not crawl while the rest of the business runs sprints, and Helio AI built the engine that finally matches the pace. You can feel the confidence baked into this round, the same way you can hear the hum change when an engineer powers up a system built to run at full capacity.
The origin story behind this team explains why the product hits so clean. Co-Founder & CEO Iako Jikia went from pro tennis to corporate leadership to exiting his first startup, and that kind of career arc gives a person a sixth sense for slow processes pretending to be normal. Co-Founder & COO Nini Mosiashvili brought the academic precision and operational mindset that turn vision into systems, not slogans. Co-Founder & CTO Natia Kukhilava arrived with real AI depth, Forbes 30 Under 30 credentials and research across the GAIN consortium, giving Helio AI the rare ability to process low-resource languages with 94% accuracy. Co-Founder & CPO Sulkhan Sakhvadze added the product discipline of someone who built solutions inside a major bank where every detail matters. Taken together, the team has the kind of range that investors do not have to second guess.
What makes the market listen is the performance. Companies hiring through Helio AI are moving 3x faster while offloading up to 70% of recruiter tasks to an AI agent that screens 500 resumes in 10 to 15 seconds. More than 500K applications processed. More than 1K recruiters using it across 6 countries. More than 300 brands already locked in. Gamified psychometric assessments that take 7 to 10 minutes and actually evaluate behavior rather than asking people to check boxes. A standalone platform that does not need integrations to function because it was built to run the entire workflow end to end. These numbers do not whisper, they punch right through the noise.
Winning INMerge Innovation Summit, the Nexus Awards, the Merito Award, and the CARE Caucasus Award only confirmed what the adoption curve already made obvious. The world needed a recruiting platform that respects time, language, and context. Helio AI built one, and now the global scale-up begins. This round fuels expansion across emerging markets, deeper AI capability, and a product roadmap that keeps giving recruiters the one thing they never have enough of: time to focus on the decisions that actually shape the future of their companies.
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