Alex Is Reimagining the First Interview — With an AI on the Other Side of the Video Call
Alex, a Y Combinator Winter 2024 company, is betting that an AI recruiter can do that first conversation not just faster, but better, and the company’s early momentum suggests a lot of employers agree. The first real filter in most hiring processes is still a phone screen: a harried recruiter, a candidate balancing their calendar, and a conversation that is often too short to reveal much signal.
Founded in 2024 and based in San Francisco, Alex is an agentic AI recruiter built by Aaron Wang and John Rytel, designed to extract a stronger hiring signal from every applicant and dramatically shorten the time it takes to hire. The product conducts live video-call interviews with candidates, using the set of interview questions that an employer chooses or that are recommended based on the job description. During the interview, Alex asks personalized follow-up questions in real time, based on how the candidate is responding, exactly the kind of adaptive behavior that separates a skilled human interviewer from a scripted screen. Companies can customize Alex for their roles in minutes, and the AI recruiter has already conducted thousands of interviews across engineering, IT, retail, hospitality, and beyond.
The founders come from a technical background well suited to the challenge of building an interview agent that candidates actually want to talk to. Before Alex, Wang worked in quantitative finance and at Facebook AI; he studied computer science, applied math, and economics at Brown. Rytel, the company’s technical co-founder, describes himself simply as someone who “just builds,” an understated framing that belies the engineering sophistication required to deliver low-latency, context-aware conversations at scale.
The market opportunity is vast. Recruiting is one of the largest line items in most operating budgets and one of the most labor-intensive functions inside any growing company. Legacy applicant tracking systems and phone-screen workflows have barely changed in a decade, while candidate expectations for speed, transparency, and fairness have risen sharply. Alex sits directly in the path of that mismatch, offering a product that scales with demand, treats every applicant consistently, and frees human recruiters to focus their attention on higher-value work such as sourcing and closing.
Investor and media interest has followed. Alex has been the subject of a TechCrunch feature announcing a $17 million raise to automate initial job interviews, and the founders recently shared a pitch deck covered in Business Insider and other outlets describing how they raised their seed round. Coverage has also explored what it is like on the candidate side, with reporting on how “your next job interview may be with ‘Alex,’ the AI interviewer.” The company is positioned at the intersection of enterprise software and the new generation of AI-native workflow products, with focus areas spanning SaaS, B2B, recruiting, HR tech, and AI.
The team has scaled to 30 people and is actively hiring across multiple functions, including a Sales Development Representative, Business Operations, and a Full-Stack Software Engineer. That hiring pattern, combining technical depth with early go-to-market investment, is consistent with a company moving from product-market fit into scale mode.
For talent leaders who have long felt stuck between hiring faster and hiring better, Alex is making a concrete case that they can do both. If the early traction holds, the company has an opportunity to become a foundational layer of how modern organizations meet their next generation of hires.