Popp AI

Popp AI is a London-based recruitment technology company building an AI-native platform to transform how enterprise hiring teams and staffing agencies manage high-volume talent acquisition. Founded in 2023 by Sam Dhesi, James Cochrane-Dyet, and Ilyès Benmansour, the company was born from the founders' direct experience of the inadequacies of recruitment processes exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The problem Popp AI tackles is structural: recruitment teams are overwhelmed by volume, spending the majority of their time on administrative tasks — screening CVs, scheduling interviews, chasing documents — rather than the relationship-building that actually drives quality hiring outcomes. Candidates, meanwhile, experience impersonal, slow, and often silent processes that damage employer brands and candidate trust.

Popp AI's platform sits between an existing ATS and the recruitment team, deploying AI agents that can conduct open-ended conversational screening via WhatsApp, email, and SMS in 90+ languages; automatically analyse and score thousands of applications; schedule interviews; and collect documentation — all integrating with 40+ ATS systems out of the box. For every human FTE, Popp adds the equivalent of 1.3 additional AI-powered FTE at a fraction of the cost.

The company has partnered with major staffing organisations including Randstad and Robert Walters, and has been independently audited for AI fairness by Warden AI. In November 2024, Popp AI closed a £3.6 million seed round co-led by Emerge and SuperSeed Ventures. The company has also received a Breakthrough Culture Award, reflecting its people-first values as it scales.