THE OPPORTUNITY
Recruiting is still a system of record, not a system of action
Across enterprises, staffing firms, and high-growth startups, hiring remains one of the most manual and time-sensitive workflows. Most organizations have digitized tracking (ATS, spreadsheets, portals). The actual work still happens outside the system: interpreting requirements, chasing candidates, running screening loops, and coordinating interviews across multiple stakeholders
The workflow is full of drop-offs and coordination debt. Candidates don’t complete applications, or they drop because communication is slow or unclear. Recruiters spend hours on searches and repetitive screening, and then lose days in scheduling ping-pong. The result is predictable: qualified candidates exit the funnel, hiring managers see low-quality shortlists, and offers fail at the joining stage.
Across the workflow, there are massive gaps:
- 70% of candidates never complete an application; 54% drop off mid-way; 20% of fit candidates are rejected due to keyword filters in legacy ATS.
- Recruiters spend 25+ hours/week on database searches; 65% of screening calls yield no viable candidates; interviews see 3–5 days scheduling delays with 40% reschedules; 15% of offers never join.
- Time to hire and cost to hire have steadily increased to ~44 days with ~$4,700 respectively driven largely by manual coordination and drop-offs.
AI is transforming recruitment to system of action
Until recently, software could automate fragments of the workflow, often as rigid rules or messaging templates. With agentic AI, the system can maintain context, operate across channels (voice, WhatsApp, SMS, email), and take supervised actions across the lifecycle. This shifts recruiting from process automation to autonomous execution, with auditable and explainable decisions that organizations can trust.
The market opportunity is two-act and large
Recruitment remains under-digitized, with only a small share of spend captured by software today, despite the clear ROI of compressing time-to-hire and reducing drop-offs.
We see a clear opportunity as AI agents move from “support” to “execution,” the category expands into replacing large parts of the staffing workflow, a ~$140B global opportunity.
UNIQUE APPROACH
HireBound is building an AI recruitment team that executes hiring workflows end to end, and then turns every interaction into better sourcing, screening, and matching. It executes the workflow, learns from outcomes, and compounds in quality
At the core is June, an AI Recruiter, designed for high-velocity workflows where response time and follow-ups decide outcomes. June runs the highest-friction parts of recruiting in one continuous loop:
- Job ingestion to structured role mapping, powered by HireBound’s Role Context Graph
- Always-on omni-channel candidate engagement – WhatsApp, text, email, and voice, collects resumes, answers questions, screens, and schedules
AI-led evaluation and matching, with shortlists pushed back to recruiters or hiring managers and outcomes tracked
HireBound couples Agentic AI with Smart ATS that converts hiring signals into operational execution: it enriches candidate profiles from conversations and documents, tracks team and recruiter activity, and progresses pipelines automatically as agents complete tasks. It also supports ATS sync, Excel imports, and exportable trackers.
HireBound also runs an active feedback loop that captures every recruiter interaction and candidate conversations, using these signals to continuously refine its screening models, recommendation and ranking logic over time. Layered on top is an intelligent outreach layer that monitors candidate drop-offs, uses optimal engagement strategies and adapts to recruiter preferences.
What this changes in practice
In a typical staffing workflow, days are lost to missed calls and slow follow-ups. In HireBound’s case, June moves a candidate from application to scheduled interview in under 10 minutes by combining text collection, voice confirmation, and scheduling in one flow
Starting with a focused target market
HireBound is starting with US–India staffing firms, where high volume and speed sensitivity make automation ROI immediate, and where an agent can own the workflow rather than just assist it.
FOUNDING TEAM AND WAY AHEAD
HireBound is being built by founders who have lived both sides of the problem: HRTech domain depth and AI-first product execution.
Sharad Vij (Co-founder and CEO) has spent over a decade in recruitment and HRTech, and has scaled recruiting systems from the inside. He was an early hire at LinkedIn India and scaled LinkedIn India’s business across Large Enterprises and Staffing segment where had handled some of their largest clients across a Multi million dollar portfolio. He was also an early employee at Mettl, giving him deep exposure to how hiring actually runs at scale across staffing and enterprise workflows
Kumar Vikramaditya (Co-founder and CTO) is a product-first builder with 10+ years in software engineering. He is a 2x founder and was the first engineer at Zuma (YC W21), where he scaled the engineering team, giving him the operating muscle to build and ship fast across complex workflows.
The founding duo’s origin story is also rooted in the workflow they are rebuilding. They met in 2020 when Vikram was hiring at Zuma and reached out to Sharad to expedite the process, and later collaborated to build and scale a recruiter tool built on google sheets.
HireBound has started with the India–US staffing corridor, where speed and volume make automation ROI immediate. The company has powered over 3 million candidate conversations and is trained on 2M+ resumes and 30,000+ job openings
With this round the company is aiming to scale across staffing firms and enterprise talent teams in US and India. They will prioritise the following 3 areas:
- Product: deepen the agentic engine to autonomously run more of the recruiting lifecycle across roles, geographies, and channels, and strengthen integrations with ATS and HRMS, plus hiring analytics. This is also where HireBound is investing in industry-specific distilled models to lift screening accuracy and compress time-to-hire.
- GTM: build a repeatable motion across multiple ICPs, running a hybrid model across SaaS and managed hiring, and scaling sales, delivery, and customer success
- Team: expand hiring across engineering, AI/ML, and operations to support international rollout and region-specific compliance needs.
At Kalaari, we’re excited to partner with Sharad and Vikram as they build the execution layer recruiting has been missing, and scale HireBound into default infrastructure for modern, high-velocity hiring.
Sharad Vij, Co-founder and CEO says,“ We were looking for investors who didn’t just see recruiting as a software category, but as an execution layer ready to be transformed by AI. Kalaari immediately understood that HireBound isn’t just automating workflows — we’re fundamentally redefining how hiring gets done.
Their team engaged with us like operators, diving into product details, go-to-market strategy, and long-term category creation. That level of alignment, combined with their speed and conviction, made Kalaari a natural partner for our journey”.
Jayraj Bharat Patel, AVP, Kalaari Capital says, ” We are excited to back Sharad and Vikram — operators who have lived the complexity of hiring and are now building with speed and instinct. HireBound’s vision of an AI-native recruitment team that can execute hiring workflows end-to-end reflects the shift from systems of record to systems of action, with the potential to materially improve speed, quality, and outcomes across modern hiring.”
Kalaari Capital is an early-stage, technology-focused venture capital firm based in Bengaluru, India. Since 2006, Kalaari has empowered visionary entrepreneurs building unique solutions that reshape the way Indians live, work, consume and transact.
The firm’s ethos is to partner early with founders and work with them to navigate the inevitable challenges of fostering ideas into successful businesses.
At its core, Kalaari believes in building long-term relationships based on trust, transparency, authenticity, and respect.
Kalaari Capital is an early-stage, technology-focused venture capital firm based out of Bengaluru, India. Since 2006, Kalaari has empowered visionary entrepreneurs building unique solutions that reshape the way Indians live, work, consume and transact. The firm’s ethos is to partner early with founders and work with them to navigate the inevitable challenges of fostering ideas into successful businesses. At its core, Kalaari believes in building long-term relationships based on trust, transparency, authenticity, and respect.
If you are a founder building an early-stage company, write to us at pitch@kalaari.com
