Recruiting and Talent Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) in the San Francisco Bay Area 2025

Lever is one of the most recognized brands in talent acquisition software for high growth companies. We enable teams to post jobs, source, interview, and hire top talent. We've combined ATS & CRM into a single platform, Lever TRM. Our Talent Acquisition Suite also includes tools for recruitment marketing and analytics: Lever Nurture, Lever Advanced Analytics, and Lever Data Warehouse Sync. Our customers include Netflix, KPMG, Spotify, Talend, Cirque du Soleil, and over 5000 other customers. Lever has raised $123 million in funding from Apax Digital, Adam Street Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, and Y Combinator among others. With an overall gender ratio of 50:50, Lever is also fiercely committed to building a team culture that celebrates diversity and inclusion. For more information, visit https://www.lever.co/.

Gem’s talent engagement platform helps recruiting teams use data and automation to improve hiring speed, quality, and diversity. Gem unifies data and context from the tools recruiters use every day, including email, applicant tracking systems, LinkedIn, and other social networks, to create a source of truth for all talent relationships. Armed with insights about the entire recruiting process, automation to reach out to talent at scale, and true cross-functional collaboration tools, TA teams can proactively and strategically plan for what’s ahead. Gem's customers are savvy recruiting teams from industry-leading companies — like Wayfair, Dropbox, Nasdaq, Cisco, and Doordash — who understand that hiring the best talent in the market is key to maintaining their competitive advantage.

Fountain’s all-in-one high volume hiring platform empowers the world’s leading enterprises to find the right people through smart, fast, and seamless recruiting. Candidates can apply anytime, anywhere in minutes, right from their phone. Automated and customizable processes streamline the candidate experience and save time for recruitment teams so they can scale with growing hiring needs. Advanced analytics provide end-to-end process visibility so managers can make swift, data-driven decisions. Throughout the candidate journey, the openly integrated platform enables companies to find, qualify and convert more applicants. Fountain’s global customers hire over 1.2 million workers annually in 78 countries.

Torch is a learning and development company that helps employers manage and measure employee growth at scale. Customers can draw from a pool of over 6000 mentors and coaches to pair with high performers and new managers at any layer of the organization. Torch was founded by a team of executive coaches and experienced psychologists who are passionate about helping all professionals perform at their highest level. Torch is on a mission to empower managers to thrive in high growth, high-performance cultures by building the self-awareness and skills required to manage and lead effectively.

10by10 is a marketplace to instantly match qualified candidates with companies by pooling candidates across recruitment agencies. Check out the testimonials on our website (www.10by10.io).

Instawork is the on-demand staffing app for hourly workers and hospitality businesses. Our vision is to create economic opportunity for local businesses and professionals, globally. Workers need a better way to find great local jobs and businesses need a better way to find quality workers fast.

Manara untaps the human potential in the Arab world and helps global tech companies access high-quality, diverse talent. We identify the top software engineers in the region and offer them a last-mile solution to land their dream jobs: interview preparation and referrals.

ModernLoop helps every company automate and streamline recruiting operations to deliver the best candidate experience. In 2022, the Department of Labor estimates there is a global talent shortage of 40 million workers, and that number is expected to grow to over 85 million by 2030. In order for companies to win the war for talent, they need to provide a best-in-class candidate experience to recruit top talent, and our product aims at doing just that! Our founders Lydia Han (CEO) and Chris Triolo (CTO) both founded ModernLoop in December of 2020 after they saw the challenges recruiting teams had when it came to coordinating hundreds of interviews across various teams, all while making sure both hiring managers and candidates had the best experience possible. After spending 15+ combined years at companies like Facebook, Slack, Brex and Salesforce, they understood what it took to enable talent teams do their best work, and are building a product to scale alongside them as they grow. We created ModernLoop to serve companies of all sizes in every industry to help Talent teams interview candidates quicker, easier, and enhance productivity of teams as they continue their search for top talent!

We have hundreds of fully qualified and experienced contractors in Information Security, Cloud Security, Privacy and Compliance available at competitive hourly rates.

We build pre-employment assessments that accurately simulate the work your applicants will actually be doing on-the-job.

The Computer Science Proficiency Assessment (CSPA™) is a comprehensive standardized exam for software engineers. The CSPA assesses your technical knowledge, skills, and abilities across a broad array of topics. We write the CSPA exam questions, software engineers take the test, and we share the results with employers and schools. MARKETING & SALES: We actively find software engineers to take our test, whether direct or through partnerships. On the other side, we actively partner with employers looking to hire. PRODUCT: We build the exam content manage system, a proctoring framework, and autograding system, as well as a SaaS employer product to browse the candidate database.

Triplebyte is LinkedIn for software engineers. We help great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time and effort. We work with a wide range of companies, including Apple, Facebook, Stripe and Dropbox and a lot more of mid-sized and smaller companies.

Pomello maps your organizational culture on a team-by-team basis, and integrates with your existing recruiting process to allow you to find the candidates most likely to thrive within your organization. Founded at Stanford University, Pomello’s technology is based on 30 years of research in Organizational Behavior, which has been validated over time across multiple industries.

Forage is changing the world of career discovery and skill-building. We partner with leading companies to create online job simulations for college students to build skills, gain experience and better understand different career paths. Our free digital learning simulations simulate a 'day in the life' of a junior employee, giving students the chance to complete hypothetical tasks, learn from employees and understand which roles are aligned with their interests and skills. We believe 'talent is distributed evenly, but opportunity is not'. Our programs let the world's most iconic employers to open their doors to students from all backgrounds, regardless of where they are located, what they study and what university they go to. Employers use these simulations to attract, and ultimately hire, exceptional and high-intent candidates from broad and diverse audiences. There are now +4m students in the Forage community, and we currently run job simulations with leading organizations including GE, BCG, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Lululemon, EY, Accenture, Latham & Watkins, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Citi, BNY Mellon, Prudential, Verizon, Bloomberg, Oliver Wyman, HPE, KPMG, Deloitte, and others.

YouTeam has helped more than 60 YC startups hire top-notch engineers they couldn't find elsewhere. YouTeam connects you with select offshore developers seeking full-time contracts that aren't listed on any freelance portals or job boards. We are the only platform accessing this previously untapped talent pool, allowing us to select the "crème de la crème" of the talent.