Gem

Gem was founded in 2017 by Steve Bartel and Nick Bushak, who met as students at MIT. Bartel was among Dropbox's first employees and, as an engineering leader there, helped grow the company past 1,000 people; Bushak led product engineering teams at Facebook as it scaled from roughly 500 to 25,000 employees. Both experienced firsthand how recruiting was shifting from a reactive, inbound process to a proactive, sales-and-marketing-like discipline in which the best companies built and nurtured relationships with passive talent long before candidates applied. Seeing that recruiters lacked a dedicated 'source of truth' for this proactive sourcing work -- and that companies like Facebook had to build internal tools to fill the gap -- Bartel and Bushak set out to build 'Salesforce for hiring.' Gem went through Y Combinator's Summer 2017 batch and grew from roughly $100K to $1M in ARR in under a year with a small founding engineering and sales team recruited almost entirely through the founders' own first- and second-degree networks from MIT, Dropbox, and Facebook.

Gem's initial product was a recruiting CRM: a platform to source, message, and nurture passive candidates, track outreach performance (open/reply/interest rates), and sync talent pools to a company's existing applicant tracking system (ATS). Early customers included Slack, DoorDash, Coinbase, Peloton, and Pure Storage. The company raised a $37M Series B, announced July 16, 2020, marking Greylock's first investment in the company. By September 2021, Gem had more than 800 customers, including over 100 'unicorns' (private companies valued at $1B+) such as Gusto, Sift, and Cockroach Labs, and had tripled its ARR and doubled its customer base over the prior year. On September 28, 2021, Gem announced a $100M Series C at a $1.2B valuation -- becoming a unicorn itself -- led by ICONIQ Growth, with participation from returning investors Greylock and Accel and new investors Sapphire Ventures and Meritech Capital. That round brought total funding to $148M, a figure that (per Gem's own site) remains its disclosed total funding as of August 2026, suggesting no further disclosed primary equity round since 2021.

Gem continued to expand its executive team and product surface through the early 2020s: in April 2022 it hired Richard Cho as its first Chief Recruiting Officer and reported facilitating over 230,000 hires in the prior year across a customer base that had grown from about 400 to more than 1,200 companies (Robinhood, Asana, Instacart, and Cisco among them). By its 5th anniversary (May 2022), Gem reported roughly $30M in ARR, ~300 employees (targeting 400+ by year-end), and $148M raised to date. In September 2023, Gem announced it was building its own ATS (Gem ATS) to let customers consolidate their sourcing, CRM, and applicant-tracking tech stack into one platform -- directly extending its footprint from a CRM/sourcing layer that sat alongside ATSs like Greenhouse, Lever, and Workday into a full end-to-end recruiting suite. In May 2024, Gem acquired InterviewPlanner, an intelligent interview-scheduling startup, and integrated it as 'Gem Scheduling.'

Business model

B2B SaaS sold primarily to talent acquisition / recruiting teams, priced per-seat/tiered by company size (Startups, Growth, Enterprise, Recruiting Firms), with an all-in-one bundle (CRM + ATS + Sourcing + Scheduling + Analytics) as well as point modules that integrate with third-party ATSs (Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, iCIMS, SmartRecruiters).

Recurring subscription (SaaS) revenue, enterprise contracts with annual pricing; free-for-eligible-startups program used historically for early customer acquisition.