Juicebox
YC S22Los Angeles, US · Founded 2022 · Delaware LLC · 65 employees · Hiring · 8 known investors
Juicebox is an AI recruiting platform that helps talent acquisition teams discover, evaluate, and outreach to candidates at scale using AI search across 800M+ global profiles, alongside AI agents that automate sourcing and follow-up workflows.
Also known as Inc. · Juicebox App · Juicebox (PeopleGPT) · PeopleGPT
Founders & leadership· Y Combinator alumni (S22)
Juicebox was founded in 2022 by David Paffenholz and Ishan Gupta.
Investors · 8
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Reported raises · per SEC filings
Form D private placements$20K disclosed across 1 of 5 rounds · 2025–2026
▶$20KraisedMar 2025 · 1 investors · ManufacturingRule 506(c)
- Logan Kaeleigh GilbertExecutive Officer
- Duane Leigh GilbertExecutive Officer
- Amount sold
- $20K
- Minimum investment
- $10K
- Proceeds to insiders
- $10K
- First sale
- Feb 2025
- Incorporated
- Limited Liability Company, Delaware, 2024
- Federal exemptions
- 06c
Source: SEC EDGAR Form D. Amounts as filed; amended filings shown once at their latest values.
Company profile
researched Aug 2026Juicebox, which markets its search product as PeopleGPT, is an AI recruiting and candidate-sourcing platform. Its core capability is natural-language search over a corpus described as 800M+ profiles aggregated from 30+ data sources, returning ranked candidate lists with match scores and enriched "smart profiles" that include linked data sources, AI-inferred skills and technical detail. Alongside search the platform provides a candidate CRM, talent-pool insights, and multi-step personalized email outreach sequences with open/reply tracking.
The second pillar of the product is Juicebox Agents, autonomous workflows that, after an initial calibration, run search, candidate assessment and outreach continuously; agents can be configured to auto-email or auto-shortlist and can be shared across an organization. The company's AI-reference site positions Juicebox as consolidating sourcing, outreach, candidate CRM, talent rediscovery and reporting into one platform that layers on top of an existing applicant tracking system via 50+ integrations rather than replacing the system of record. Documented use cases include sourcing technical and engineering talent using signals such as GitHub commit activity, languages used, and stars/forks, and keeping long-open senior roles supplied with continuously refreshed candidate pipelines.
Sources differ on some company facts: Y Combinator lists the headquarters as Los Angeles with a team size of 65, while Juicebox's own AI-reference site and a third-party profile state San Francisco; job listings are posted for San Francisco. Customer counts cited across sources range from 2,500 (September 2025) to 3,000+ and 5,000+ in later material.
Founding story
Founded in 2022 by David Paffenholz and Ishan Gupta, who went through Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch (primary partner Harj Taggar). Paffenholz, co-founder and CEO, previously worked on growth at Snap and holds a Bachelor's in Economics from Harvard; Gupta previously was a software engineer at BlueLearn and left computer science studies at Dartmouth to build Juicebox through YC. Sequoia describes both founders as immigrants — Paffenholz from Germany, Gupta from India — who were motivated by their own frustrations with traditional recruiting and spent years iterating on talent workflows and LLMs.
Business model
B2B SaaS sold on a per-seat subscription with a usage-credit component. Published tiers are Free ($0, limited searches), Starter ($99/seat/month annual or $119 monthly, unlimited searches, 500 contact and 500 export credits), Growth ($179/$199 per seat/month, talent insights, 1,500 credits, up to 5 seats, 3 mailboxes per user) and a custom-priced annual-only Business plan adding onboarding, unlimited contact credits, usage analytics, hiring-manager seats, ATS/CRM integration, network sourcing and priority support. Juicebox Agents are an add-on at $199 per agent per month with unlimited contact and email credits.
Recurring subscription revenue from per-seat plans plus per-agent add-on fees and custom enterprise contracts; a third-party profile characterizes the model as SaaS subscription with $10M+ ARR and 20%+ monthly growth.
Traction
Bootstrapped to $1M ARR with a four-person team before scaling to roughly $10M ARR and 2,500 customers by September 2025, with revenue reported as growing more than 10x over the prior year. Later material cites 3,000+ and 5,000+ customer counts, 20%+ monthly growth, thousands of searches run daily, and a team of 65. The Series B in March 2026 was reported at an $850M valuation.
Latest developments
Announcement of Juicebox Agent 4.0 on the company homepage, an $80M Series B at an $850M valuation reported on 2026-03-10, hiring for customer success, sales operations, growth product, engineering and account executive roles in San Francisco, the addition of Linda Lin as VP of Customer Success, and the publication of an AI-agent-facing information site (info.juicebox.ai) with a public Q&A API for AI assistants.
▸Full profile — market position, technology, go-to-market, geography, history, risks & controversies
Market position
Positioned in the AI candidate-sourcing category alongside SeekOut, hireEZ, Gem, Fetcher, Findem, Moonhub and LinkedIn Recruiter. Company-published comparison material claims advantages in time-to-shortlist, plain-language search and pricing transparency while acknowledging SeekOut leads on technical data depth. Its investor Sequoia describes Juicebox as differentiated from legacy platforms that organize resumes by actively sourcing, qualifying and engaging candidates.
Natural-language retrieval by meaning rather than Boolean keyword matching; breadth of aggregated profile data (800M+ profiles, 30+ sources) with enrichment and impact-oriented signals; autonomous agents that run continuous sourcing and outreach rather than one-off searches; transparent, self-serve published pricing including a free tier; and an overlay architecture that sits on top of the customer's existing ATS through 50+ integrations.
Technology
LLM-powered candidate search (PeopleGPT) that interprets plain-language queries instead of Boolean strings, an AI search-builder and AI filters, scoring of tens of thousands of profiles per search against user-defined criteria, AI "spotlight" explanations of candidate fit, profile enrichment across 30+ live data sources, AI-generated and templated outreach sequences, and autonomous Agents that run the search-assess-engage loop 24/7 with recruiter approval of outreach. Integrations connect to ATS and CRM systems; a trust center is published at trust.juicebox.ai covering GDPR and CCPA posture, candidate data rights and retention.
Go-to-market
Product-led and self-serve motion built around a free tier and free trial with published, transparent pricing, complemented by a book-a-demo sales path for larger Business accounts. Growth has been described as viral/bottoms-up: founders adopt it day one at early-stage startups, recruiters bring it into later-stage companies such as Ramp and Perplexity, and at large enterprises agents supplement existing sourcing teams. The company also publishes an extensive content and comparison library (migration playbooks, buyer guides, vendor landscape pages) and an AI-agent-facing question-answering endpoint at info.juicebox.ai for AI search systems.
Talent acquisition and recruiting teams, in-house recruiters, hiring managers, recruiting agencies and startup founders, spanning solo users and small teams through Fortune 500 enterprises. Named users include Ramp, Perplexity, Quora, Cursor, Anyscale and AI labs, as well as Sequoia's own recruiting team.
Geography
US-based; Y Combinator lists Los Angeles, CA as the location while the company's AI-reference site and a third-party profile cite San Francisco, where its open roles are posted. Data coverage and customers are described as global.
History
2022: founded and accepted into Y Combinator Summer 2022. The team bootstrapped to $1M ARR with four people and raised a $6M seed round led by NFDG that was not announced at the time. September 2025: announced $36M in total funding, including a $30M Series A led by Sequoia Capital with Coatue, NFDG, Y Combinator, Lux Capital and BOND participating, and said it was hiring across 15+ roles. March 2026: raised an $80M Series B led by DST Global at a reported $850M valuation, with a third-party tracker recording $110M across two tracked rounds. Product has expanded from search into CRM, talent insights, outreach sequencing and Agents, with Agent 4.0 promoted as the largest release to date.
Risks & controversies
Sources disclose no controversies. Notable data caveats: sources conflict on headquarters (Los Angeles vs. San Francisco), employee count (65 per Y Combinator vs. 11-50 or 35 on a third-party profile), total funding ($36M disclosed by the company in 2025 vs. $110M/$116M on a third-party aggregator), customer counts (2,500 / 3,000+ / 5,000+ / 25,000 teams) and number of data sources (30+ vs. 60+). The business relies on aggregating third-party candidate data, and the company publishes GDPR/CCPA, candidate-data-rights and retention documentation via a trust center, indicating privacy and compliance as material considerations. Several growth and outcome figures (e.g., up to 3x more replies) are company-stated and unaudited.
Compiled by commissioned research from 8 cited public sources — announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.
Key figures
latest reportedCompany-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed — not independently audited.
Competitors · 6
by search overlap
Companies competing with Juicebox for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.
Timeline · 6
launches, deals, and filingsSeries B of $80M led by DST Global, with Coatue, NFDG, Sequoia Capital, Verified Capital and Y Combinator participating; reported at an $850M valuation.
$80M source ↗
Company blog references recognition by Brex as a fast-growing AI tool for recruiting teams.
Company blog post authored by Linda Lin describes her joining Juicebox as VP of Customer Success and building a customer success team.
Company website promotes Juicebox Agent 4.0, described as its largest product release, alongside its Search (PeopleGPT), CRM and Agents modules.
Juicebox disclosed $36M in funding comprising a $30M Series A led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Coatue, NFDG, Y Combinator, Lux Capital and BOND, following a previously unannounced $6M seed round led by NFDG. Proceeds earmarked for team growth and investment in Juicebox Agents.
$36M source ↗
Juicebox was part of Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch; primary partner Harj Taggar.
Dated company events from announcements, filings, and press; legal rows summarize public dockets and regulator releases.
Legal entities · 1
corporate structureIn the news
▸Research sources · 8
primary sources listed
- Juiceboxjuicebox.ai · web
8 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.
Frequently asked questions
- What does Juicebox do?
- AI recruiting platform offering natural-language candidate search, CRM and autonomous sourcing agents over 800M+ profiles.
- Who founded Juicebox?
- Juicebox was founded by David Paffenholz, Ishan Gupta in 2022.
- Who are Juicebox's investors?
- Juicebox's investors include Amino Capital, Brave Capital, Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, BOND, DST Global, Lux Capital, NFDG.
- How much funding has Juicebox raised?
- Juicebox has disclosed $20K raised across 1 of its 5 known rounds.
- Where is Juicebox headquartered?
- Juicebox is headquartered in Los Angeles, US.