London AI company set to disrupt HR departments raises £5.5m

By Jess Jones

AI could decide whether or not you land your next job.

London-based artificial intelligence (AI) company Metaview has raised $7m (£5.5m) as it seeks to speed up and improve the hiring process using technology.

Early-stage investment fund Plural led the funding round for Metaview, which says it uses AI to “create a single source of truth” for hiring teams, saving them at least 20 hours per hire.

Metaview does this by usinglarge language models, which can understand human text and speech, to decipher hiring conversations better. This data can help teams choose the best candidates.

Siadhal Magos, chief executive at Metaview said: “Hiring is driven by human-to-human conversations, yet before now it’s been impossible to capture and operationalise the data from these crucial interactions.

“With Metaview, thousands of companies are turning to our AI-native platform to harness this data, save time on busy work, and apply the insights we create to help their teams hire the right candidates. We’re delighted to be partnering with Plural to drive our next phase of growth and help more companies radically enhance their hiring workflows and decisions.”

The company intends to use the new funding to accelerate product development and triple its engineering team.

In just a year, Metaview’s customer base has shot up by 2000 per cent, with current clients including Brex, Quora, Pleo, and Improbable. The market for AI HR tools is expected tohit $6.18bn by 2024%20of%2017.1%25.).

Metaview was co-founded in 2018 by former Palantir and Uber product and engineering managers, Siadhal Magos and Shahriar Tajbakhsh.

Khaled Helioui, partner at Plural said: “Hiring decisions are critical to the success of any business, but for decades this crucial step has been ignored by technology. Siadhal and Shahriar, having honed their skills at Uber and Palantir, notorious for setting new standards of excellence in terms of recruiting, are uniquely positioned to change this dynamic.

“Metaview is making recruitment decisions better, faster, and more objective. In doing so, it’s creating improved outcomes and contributing to more equitable workplaces by removing some of the pervasive biases that clog most hiring processes.”

But it comes amid concerns about biases within AI systems. Technology intended to strip human prejudice out of hiring may have the opposite effect. In 2018, Amazon ditched its AI recruitment tool that favoured male over female candidates.

Plural’s funding was supported by Coelius Capital and existing investors Vertex Ventures US, Seedcamp, Village Global, as well as a couple of angel investors.