Pre-seed funding round led by Antler and a range of high profile angels with deep recruitment expertise
Vente AI automates business development processes for recruiters, reducing the cost of sales for agencies by 90%
Funding will be used to accelerate product development and team growth for this emerging ‘rectech’ startup
London, UK – 28 Nov 2024: Vente AI, the startup building AI to automate business development for recruiters, has raised £500k just six months after being founded.
The investment comes from Antler, the most active early-stage VC in Europe, and a range of angel investors with experience in recruitment and ‘rectech’ including Thomas Vose, whose rectech startup, HireAra was recently acquired by the Access Group.
The London-based startup is re-imagining business development for recruitment agencies by streamlining lead identification, analysis and prioritisation through AI-powered automation. These are some of the most time-consuming and costly processes for recruitment agencies, accounting for 40% of an individual recruiters’ time.
With Vente AI’s lead analysis model, recruiters can automate sales processes and access recommendations on new opportunities most likely to close.
This is particularly important in the highly saturated UK recruitment market. There are the same number of recruitment agencies in the UK as the US. However, 80% of UK recruitment agencies make less than £1M pa in revenue. As a result, competition for new leads is fierce and there is a significant opportunity for smaller agencies to level the playing field with AI technology.
The Vente AI product has been live for just two months. In that time, early adopters have generated over £300k of additional revenue by processing 250 candidates and saving 1,500 hours of manual processing.
The funding will be used to accelerate product development, hiring and building new functionality for the startup’s AI component. In addition, Vente AI will be investing in integrating its service with existing recruitment tools to increase the speed of adoption for new users.
“I spent over 12 years working in the recruitment industry and know how time consuming business development can be. Recruiters use manual processes to match the best candidates with great companies. Automating these processes will reduce costs and increase productivity for recruiters, which could have a significant impact on one of the UK’s largest professional services industry, and create a more efficient and competitive employment market in the process.”
Cameron Briggs, CEO and co-founder of Vente AI
The founding team of Vente AI are old friends who came together during the founder residency run by Antler in London to build Vente AI. They combine domain expertise with technical expertise.
Cameron Briggs spent more than 12 years in the recruitment industry, having founded a recruitment technology platform that facilitated five million job applications for companies like Uber and HSBC.
Itamar Yeshua, Chief Operating Officer, is a former colleague of Cameron who has led commercial strategy and operations at a number of venture-backed companies, including SeedLegals.
As CTO, Octavian Neguletu brings over a decade of experience in software engineering and leadership, delivering impactful solutions at scale. He has led key projects for organizations like HMRC, where he built the post-Brexit trade tariff platform that helped UK traders stay compliant. Octavian has also contributed to other Government projects, Soho House and AOL, providing innovative technological solutions across diverse industries. At Builder.ai, Octavian led the development of a platform that enhanced code quality across hundreds of developers, improving consistency and efficiency in client projects.
“When the founders of Vente AI shared their vision with us, we knew this was a significant opportunity. They are building technology to improve processes in a major industry and they combine the first-hand experience, domain expertise and technical skills to build a credible and scalable solution. We are delighted to have supported Vente AI from day zero and look forward to working with them as they continue to grow the company.”
Jed Rose, Partner at Antler
About Antler
Antler is the world’s day zero investor that inspires, enables, and invests in visionary founders everywhere. Founded on the belief that talent is everywhere but opportunity is not, we remove the barriers to entrepreneurship so more people can launch sustainable businesses that solve meaningful problems, drive innovation, and improve lives. We partner with the most early-stage entrepreneurs around the world through our residencies in 27 cities across six continents—Austin, Berlin, Bangalore, Jakarta, London, New York, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, and beyond. As an extension of our founders’ team, our global community backs them from the beginning and keeps backing them with team formation, deep business model validation, initial capital, global scaling, and follow-on funding, with a personal passion that goes beyond traditional investing. To date, we have brought more than 1,400 startups into existence that are delivering paradigm-shifting solutions across all industries, with the goal of backing more than 6,000 by 2030.
