The staffing industry has a dirty little secret: reference checks are broken. Everyone does them, nobody trusts them, and they’re the last speed bump before a hire gets greenlit. It’s a ritual that feels like waiting in line at the DMV, mandatory, outdated, and painful. RefAssured just raised $3.3 million in seed funding to turn that pain into performance intelligence. Led by Dogwood Ventures with HighSage Ventures, Bullhorn Ventures, LocumTenens.com, Jeff Bowling, Dan Campbell, Jeff Harris, and Belal Badat Ventures joining the round, this isn’t charity, it’s conviction.
The company was founded in 2022 by three veterans who already reshaped staffing once before with COMPAS Technology. Brian Vesce, CEO, knows the grind from founding and running COMPAS Technology. Dan Rothschild, CTO, architected it from the ground up, giving him the technical depth to scale again. Tommy Semereaux, CPO, translates recruiter headaches into usable product. They’ve built a nine-person team that punches above its weight with leaders like Aravinda Souza, Nishad Amin, Valentina Donaghy, and Pete Sitov driving marketing, operations, customer success, and sales. Even Loki Sitov, Chief Morale Officer, gets credit for culture.
The results read like a SaaS fairy tale, only real. Doubled recurring revenue year over year. Two hundred percent customer growth in 2025. Over one million reference checks processed, producing twenty million structured performance data points. Every customer renewed. Every customer referenceable. Enterprise agencies report a 25x ROI in the first year, often unlocking over $2 million in net new revenue through talent and client leads. That’s not incremental gain, that’s compounding momentum.
The platform does what recruiters wish they had time to do. Automated invites in under a minute. Surveys that take reference givers five to ten minutes but reveal what matters. Performance scorecards that don’t just confirm employment dates but highlight strengths and blind spots. And it integrates where recruiters already live, Bullhorn ATS/CRM, symplr CTM, Salesforce-native systems, Avionté, JobDiva, TrackerRMS. Add in zero-click automation and deliverability tracking, and suddenly references are fast, complete, and reliable.
This round fuels more than just headcount expansion. RefAssured is already testing post-hire performance evaluations to close the loop between expectation and reality. Fraud detection and identity verification are next. Universal candidate profiles and AI-driven job-match templates aren’t just features, they’re an attempt to redefine how staffing agencies compete. With clients like Vaco, Kelly Services SETT, Soliant, Ingenovis, Fusion, Atlas MedStaff, Gifted Healthcare, PRN Healthcare, GrapeTree, TalentBurst, and Kelly Science, Engineering, Technology & Telecom already bought in, the traction speaks louder than any marketing campaign.
RefAssured lives up to its name. It’s not just making reference checks better. It’s giving staffing firms the confidence that every hire comes with intelligence baked in. Congratulations to Brian Vesce, Dan Rothschild, Tommy Semereaux, and the entire RefAssured team for proving that experience, when backed by execution, earns trust, capital, and customers.
