Juicebox, the creator of AI search engine PeopleGPT, has raised $36M from Sequoia. The startup already has 2,500 customers and $10M in annual recurring revenue.
Juicebox Raises $36M to Develop AI Recruiting
For many years, recruiters used ML algorithms that selected resumes by keywords. This helped to filter out some candidates, but the final check had to be done manually.
In 2022, David Paffenholz and Ishan Gupta saw an opportunity to apply LLM to a qualitatively new level of search. This is how Juicebox was born – an AI search engine that analyzes professional profiles, personal websites and other open data to find the most relevant candidates.
PeopleGPT’s explosive growth
After Y Combinator, the team spent several years refining the product and launched PeopleGPT in late 2023. The tool was an instant hit, with startups and corporations like Cognition, Ramp, and Perplexity all using it.
Within a year, Juicebox had served over 2,500 clients, reaching $10 million in ARR. PeopleGPT’s unique feature is that it finds candidates that standard search engines miss due to a lack of keywords in their profiles.
Sequoia Investment
In September 2025, Juicebox announced it had raised $36 million, including $30 million in a Series A led by Sequoia. David Kann, a partner at the fund, said he had rarely seen a four-person team achieve such scale without a sales force.
Sequoia learned about the product through founders of other startups and its own recruiters who had already started using Juicebox. This was a decisive signal for investment.
Market and competition
Juicebox attracts both small companies without an HR department and corporations, where AI automation allows recruiters to focus more on working with people. The system not only searches for candidates, but can also automatically write to them and schedule calls.
Although the startup competes with older players like Eightfold, its rapid growth and lack of a classic “sales machine” make it a unique example of the effectiveness of AI recruiting.
Sequoia compares Juicebox to such standard startup tools as Stripe and believes that it can become the “default” service for hiring the first team.
