Superposition

Superposition provides an AI recruiting agent positioned as a headhunter for founding teams. The agent runs the hiring loop end to end — sourcing, screening, outreach and interview booking — with the customer approving or passing on candidates at each step. Onboarding is conversational: a roughly 30-minute voice intake in which the agent probes vague requirements, shows example candidates for calibration, and converts the founder's stated preferences into searchable criteria covering skills, values and working style rather than keyword-matched résumés.

Rather than working from a candidate database or job-board applicants, the agent researches the open web — GitHub repositories, personal blogs, arXiv papers, conference talks and forum activity — to identify and rank prospects, then writes personalized outreach. Sourcing runs in the background and only high-signal candidates are surfaced to the customer. The system calibrates over the life of a search, reasoning over the full history of a role and the candidates that changed the customer's mind to update subsequent searches. Superposition operates inside the tools customers already use: it posts candidates to a Slack channel where approvals happen in-thread without a separate dashboard, and connects to applicant tracking systems (Greenhouse, Ashby) and to Claude, Codex, Cursor and other external tools in both directions via MCP.

The company markets role-specific agents across engineering, sales, marketing, customer success, operations and product, and publishes segment pages for founders, technical cofounders, non-technical founders and talent leads, alongside customer case studies, a journal and a hiring manifesto.

Founding story

One co-founder spent seven years as a technical recruiter placing engineers at seed-stage startups in San Francisco, including engineer #1 at Brex, and learned to code before concluding that agency incentives — commission pressure and fear of sending an embarrassing résumé — systematically produce generically good rather than well-matched candidates. Co-founder Li was on the founding team at Vitable Health (YC S20) and scaled it from pre-seed to Series A as an engineering leader. The recruiter co-founder states he was Superposition's first customer, using the product to find his own technical cofounder.

Business model

Software-plus-success-fee service sold directly to companies, replacing retained or contingency recruitment agencies with an autonomous agent that the customer supervises by approving candidates.

Subscription plus placement fee: $500 per agent per month, plus a 15% success fee calculated on first-year base salary only, excluding equity and bonus. A 90-day replacement guarantee is offered.

Traction

Named customers and testimonials include ESAI, Plastic Labs, Trampoline AI and Hotplate. In a published case study, the agent delivered 28 curated head-of-engineering candidates over eight weeks leading to a CTO hire at ESAI; for Plastic Labs it scanned 43,802 candidates over five weeks and surfaced 15 high-conviction matches resulting in a platform engineer hire. The company reports a candidate interested-response rate roughly 3x a recruiter baseline and an average time-to-hire of about six weeks.

Latest developments

Journal posts describe calibration, which lets the agent reason over the full history of a role and the candidates that changed the customer's mind to update subsequent searches (August 2026); a manifesto on context-specific hiring and two-sided recruiting (July 2026); and bidirectional MCP setup connecting Claude, Codex and other clients to recruiting data (July 2026). The company also offers agents for sales, marketing, customer success, operations and product in addition to engineering.