LizzyAI just stepped into the recruiting arena with a fresh $5M seed round led by New Enterprise Associates, and it feels like someone finally gave the interview process the upgrade it has been pretending it already had. For an industry worth $500B and still running on inconsistent human screenings, Founder & CEO Yannis Niebelschuetz did not build this from theory. He built CoachHub into a global talent powerhouse that raised $350M+, spanned 7 offices, and served brands like Ford and Coca-Cola. When someone with that résumé says the interview is the most broken part of hiring, the room gets quiet fast.
The investors clearly heard it. Luke Pappas at NEA called out the obvious. Interviews are still manual, subjective, and all over the map. LizzyAI is building the infrastructure to turn that chaos into something scalable, intelligent, objective. Speedinvest and Zero Prime Ventures joined the round because you do not see many teams that merge AI engineering, behavioral science, industrial-organizational psychology, and global enterprise experience into a single product this focused. What makes the raise even sharper is that this is LizzyAI’s first institutional funding. Coming out the gate with $5M says the tech is not promising something; it is proving something.
The product itself is the part that makes even seasoned TA leaders do a double take. LizzyAI runs a 24/7 autonomous, two-way conversational AI interviewer across NYC, Berlin, and Barcelona. It adapts to candidate responses in real time, generates role-specific questions from job descriptions, delivers psychometric scoring built with IO psychologists and top universities, and pushes structured reports straight into ATS platforms. With SOC2, GDPR, CCPA, end-to-end encryption, and a zero data training clause, it is engineered for enterprise environments where mistakes are not an option. CTO Pedro Cabrera brings the credibility, having built AIMY, the AI coach that ended up on Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange. You can feel the engineering discipline in every corner of the platform.
The early traction is already telling the story. Engel & Völkers is using LizzyAI to interview at global scale, and Head of Agent Recruiting Sonja Debus said the platform gives them a lens to see the whole person beyond a résumé. They are seeing up to 10x lower screening costs and a 70% drop in recruiter workload. That is not a tweak to the system. That is a reshaping of what hiring efficiency actually looks like. When a luxury real estate brand says an AI interviewer helps them uncover potential humans miss, it sends a signal to every enterprise with high-volume roles and compliance-heavy demands.
What makes the moment even more interesting is how much runway sits ahead. LizzyAI is expanding ATS integrations, deepening its AI engine, growing engineering and GTM teams, and building a global customer footprint from its offices in NYC, Berlin, and Barcelona. If the interview has always been the great bottleneck, LizzyAI is turning it into the great unlock.
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