Karat

Market position

Karat describes itself as the world's leader in technical interviewing and as a "talent elevation partner" for engineering organizations, citing adoption among very large public companies, payment companies and UK banks. Its board and advisor roster includes technology and people executives from Mastercard, Airbnb, Okta, Duolingo, Electronic Arts, Citizens Bank, Abbott, Elevance Health, UnitedHealth Group, Heidrick & Struggles and Norwest Venture Partners.

Karat emphasizes consistency and comparability: the same trained interviewers, content and rubrics applied across teams, geographies and vendors, producing data that can be benchmarked against a corpus the company reports at over 600,000 technical interviews. It also positions itself as a trusted third-party standard for validating contractors and IT service provider talent, and claims specialized methodology for evaluating AI-enabled engineers.

Technology

The offering blends software with human interviewers: structured interview formats, consistent scoring rubrics, a content library spanning over 100 languages and frameworks, interview content designed to be resistant to AI-assisted cheating, and live AI-native scenario simulations for assessing how engineers work with AI. Interview outputs feed benchmarking and insights reporting drawn from Karat's interview corpus.

Go-to-market

Direct enterprise sales motion centered on demo requests and contact with sales, supported by solutions engineers during onboarding, published customer stories and testimonials from executive buyers, and content marketing including reports (e.g., "Top Engineering Talent Cities 2026"), blogs and eBooks on human + AI interview rubrics. A partner email channel is offered for prospective partners, and the Brilliant Black Minds program doubles as a candidate pipeline for customers.

Enterprise technology and engineering leadership — CIOs, CTOs, chief engineering officers and technical hiring and recruiting teams — plus HR and people functions. Named customer references include Mastercard, Duolingo, Citizens Bank, Electronic Arts, Compass, Deliveroo, Flatiron Health, Hippo and Fractal Software. Karat states its customers include 7 of the 25 largest public companies in the world, 4 of the 7 largest payment companies and all 4 of the largest UK banks.

Geography

Headquartered in Seattle, United States, with interviews conducted in more than 70 countries and a distributed network of over 500 trained and vetted interview engineers around the world. Customer references span the US and Europe, including all four of the largest UK banks.

History

Founded in 2014 by Mo Bhende and Jeffrey Spector to re-engineer the software engineering technical interview, Karat built a network of trained interview engineers and a library of researched interview content delivered as a service to employers. Company materials cite roughly 350,000 interviews conducted at one point and more than 600,000 subsequently. As the business scaled, the founders identified a broader gap: technical leaders lacked data and insights for local and global workforce decisions, while AI began to affect both technical assessment and engineering roles. Karat consequently expanded from hiring interviews into AI-native interview simulations, contractor and IT service provider evaluation, and workforce intelligence and benchmarking products.