Our AI recruitres make software invisible, says Finlay founder

Finlay was founded earlier in 2024 and nowit raises 300 000 euros pre-seed investment. How does that happen so quickly?
On reflection it feels a bit fast, but when you're doing it, it feels like forever. I'm sure some people have spent a couple years going through the process but I've seen the startup world so I knew how to get there quicker. We technically founded the company in March of this year but started really working on it a couple months before. It was at the end of last year where me and a couple of founders came together around the problem and at the beginning of the year started to validate it and then said, okay, let's go for this!

Is it easy or hard to get an early investment in Europe right now?
We quickly realized that despite having had some successful roles and companies, which got our foot in the door with investors, nobody at this current market is just giving away money. So we put our heads down, started building a prototype into MVP, got a couple of customers and started talking to the market. We got more articulate on what we wanted to do and pivoted a couple times which helped us find great partners in J&T Ventures and Depo Ventures. But at this pre-seed stage they were still mostly backing us as founders, not the product. People are still a little bit cautious, AI is crowded, so they need to believe in you and see some traction.

Do you feel like you got the right price?
We could have maybe waited a little bit more and get bigger valuation, but the investment is going to help some of the founders transition into full-time quicker. We can sell more and get it going. We're playing the scale up game so we leaned into that early and we're using the opportunity to gain some inbound traction. You can go in many different directions but the best way is just to get it up and going.

Did you already have customers when you went to the investors?
We had a viable product, though quite simple, and a couple of customers. The first one was someone I was advising – they were trying do some old fashioned recruiting and we said: Let's digitize this! The second customer came through our network. We got introduced to a company in Poland and signed a contract in four days, which was quite fast and cool. The third customer was somebody that we had worked for.

Finlay has five founders, two Americans, two Slovaks and one Czech. How did you get together?
I have known Matt Slavik and Ondrej Illek from Mews and one of them ended up working at Rossum as a recruiter where we met Juraj, the fourth one. I was experimenting on my own in the workforce management space, validating some ideas, and when I came across these guys, I invited them to go deeper into the tech and AI space. And they decided to give it a shot. We actually used an outside party to bootstrap a prototype, as we weren't technical. And then in summer we eventually met our fifth co-founder Peter Kisel, who was a CTO at Circle in the past. He joined us full time which changed everything.

How did you end up in the Czech Republic?
I've been in Europe for 10 years. I quit my civilen gineering career in Philadelphia, I was just bored and tired of it. I went to do an MBA in Rotterdam wanting to transform my career, location, everything. I figured out that I could vision things and lead in that direction. I got involved with a successful startup called Park B as employee number six, so Imoved to London for a couple of years. Then I joined the Prague based Mews as the COO, right before they got their Series A. It was wild three years going through Series B, growing from 60 to 500 people, opening 10 offices around the world. I had the lucky opportunity to build a unicorn and do the whole process.

Is Prague a good location for a tech company?
Czech Republic is a beautiful country and I like the quality of living. I call it my home. There's also a great tech ecosystem and you're getting the top talent in the world, still at a cost that's lower than in the US and some other markets.

You also got Czech investors.
We had talked to a couple of VCs and it was a learning experience. You really need to figure out what you're talking about. J&T Ventures had a really personal approach. They immediately invited us for a meeting, the whole decision-making team was sitting there and there was this feeling of trust. It was decided very quickly.

What is the disruption that you bring tothe recruitment world?
The recruitment industry is worth over $500 billion. It is bigger than all of the SaaS industries combined. But it’s very oldschool. Agencies need a lot of time to find you a talent and they charge from 25 up to40 % of annual salary. And when you decide to build an in-house team instead, itneeds a lot of support. We feel recruitment should be as simple as an Uber ride or a Wework desk, where you just say let’s Finlay-it and our AI agents help find you the best talent in the world at prices that make sense.

How does it work exactly?
All current tools are built around helping the recruiter. But with that mindset, you still just mimic the thing before. Youre create the old recruitment process. Adding some AI features to SaaS product doesn’t change anything. People want software, because they are used to it, but we want to create a human experience. Our AI agent communicates with you on Slack, WhatsApp or just calls you on phone. He also contacts potential employees personally. All in real time, on a huge scale and for a fraction of acost.

What sources does it use to discover talent?
We can access millions of profiles and billions of data points across publicly available platforms, analyze them in 20 minutes and fit the best person for the role. We like to call LinkedIn or CV's diamond data, because it's very to the point, but then you've got these raw rocks that can be polished up. Developers live on Reddit, they are solving problems on forums, their productivity happens in GitHub. We can put together a strong picture from different sources and we use natural language enhancement to drill down even more. There is a huge opportunity since about 30 to 40 % of developers aren't on LinkedIn at all and all the recruiters are fighting for the same talent. And we also want candidates to come to us directly.

How will you achieve that?
We haven't released it yet, but not too far into the future we will launch acandidate portal, which is going to start off with an evaluation tool. People can get feedback on their CV or resume with some tips on how to curate theme ssage better. We also want a place where professionals can communicate with like-minded people. It's an opportunity for us to build up a social network on our own.

Your main focus is developers?
Right now, we are focusing on tech companies that are scaling, because we can support them scaling fast. But it doesn't need to be just tech roles. We're placing sales roles, operational roles, account managers. Al though tech roles have a specific advantage because you can get data from GitHub and all these other unique sources. And we can also focus on alot of new roles that the agencies don't have readily in their index because they're up and coming. In an emerging field, you need younger generation that is growing up with it.

Is your AI successful?
Our AI and machine learning capabilities are already matching some incredible candidates. When we delivered candidates for our client in Poland, the top two were exactly right. They offered the job to the first one, got rejected, so they went with the second one.

How quickly is the technology evolving?
The current AI gets about 90 % of an action right, depending on how many steps are in the process. But technology is evolving fast. In a few years, the agents are going to do a lot more than now. There's a product curve and there’s a trust curve – not being stuck in a SaaS tools boxor an agency box can help you grow with the curve and have impact.

What functions are you working on right now?
We're really focused on our support agent, which is supposed to make the software invisible. It integrates with your Slack or leaves a voice memo, we're even experimenting with 3D avatar technology, so you can talk to the recruiter.

Do humans still have some role in this process?
Internal talent people are still important, we are just making everthing much faster, reducing the amount of work and letting recruiters free to work on high impact relationships. The way they're experiencing it is like having a high efficiency recruiter helping them. Imagine being able to come back to a candidate in the same day without any lag time, making them feel really good about the experience, all at a fraction of the cost. When you call them up immediately, you get tons of information and you catch them in a moment. We are trying to recreate these moments.

Do you feel like AI is becoming an empty buzzword sometimes?
It can be perceived as a buzzword, but I think it'sstill underestimated how much it's going to transform the world. And that's why, despite it becoming a crowded place, it's still just the beginning of the adoption and what's going to happen.

What are your goals and plans for 2025? You've done a lot in one year, so what about the next one?
Besides improving our product in many ways, we want to be an international company quite quickly. We're focused on markets like the UK, US or Netherlands and we want to scale our customers from three to 30 in about a year's time.

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