AI-powered interviewing platform Ribbon opens up for general availability this week. The start-up—boasting $8 million in funding from Radical Ventures, with participation from Social Leverage, Cadenza Ventures, and GD1—was co-founded in 2023 by an Amazon AI alum and a former head of people ops pro.

The pair is betting that intelligent voice AI in the interview process will benefit both recruiters and candidates with a faster and more candidate-friendly alternative to traditional hiring, which often require significant human effort to sift through and screen potential candidates, and can leave job seekers waiting weeks for responses, if any are provided at all.

“I have always worked within AI and applying AI to really hard problems,” said co-founder Arsham Ghahramani, pointing to his work at Amazon on AI recommendations and at cancer-screening software company Ezra. “I’ve always been really, really passionate about building very human AI products.”

In fact, it was at Ezra where he met Ribbon co-founder Dave Vu, who oversaw talent and people operations at the cancer screening company as it experienced significant growth.

“When we were there, we worked super closely together on hiring, because at the time, we were just scaling really fast as a start-up,” he said. “That was actually how the idea for Ribbon started as well, because we were hiring a ton of people at the time, and had to think a lot about, how do we hire really fast and really well?”

The platform is chiefly targeting talent acquisition (TA) in high-turnover industries, such as manufacturing, healthcare, airports, food service, and retail using AI-powered voice interviews. Ribbon’s primary offering allows candidates to interact with an AI-powered interview screener to conduct live human-like screening conversations with candidates.

The system also scores and summarizes interviews, providing insights to the TA team and offering immediate platform-generated feedback to candidates, who can also use AI-generated content inside their Ribbon profile to bolster their own chances for securing future opportunities.

“We have this kind of technology like voice AI that can make creating a platform like LinkedIn, but for everyone, way easier,” he said. “How could we get someone like a factory worker, for example, to have a profile on a platform? And…it’s actually a really big ask these days to ask someone to fully fill out their entire profile.”

Following a five-minute AI screening interview, Ribbon can transform gathered information into a profile on the platform.

More, more, more. Ribbon can be interacted with 24-7—a notable differentiator to its human counterparts, who often engage in screening and interview work during traditional 9-to-5 hours.

Interviewing outside the 9-to-5 opens opportunities for the working parent or student to actively pursue work on their own time when their schedule allows, Ghahramani said, adding that the current status quo creates barriers to opportunities for those with immovable commitments inside those “normal business hours.”

“I think there’s another subtle piece as well, which is that almost every company is restricted by the number of interviews that they can do,” he said. “There’s no company out there that can interview 100% of all the candidates at the moment if they’re doing human interviews.”

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