Popp AI Raises £3.6M to Bring Conversational AI to Enterprise Recruitment

September 6, 2024

Popp AI has raised £3.6 million in a seed funding round co-led by Emerge and SuperSeed Ventures. The capital will be used to accelerate growth across enterprise recruitment teams, talent departments, and recruitment marketplaces, while expanding the AI capabilities at the core of its platform. SuperSeed backed the company at pre-seed, making this round a continued vote of confidence from a founding investor, while Emerge's participation signals broader conviction from the European venture community in conversational AI as a recruitment category in its own right.

The recruitment industry has struggled for years to balance scale with personalisation. As hiring volumes have grown, companies have increasingly relied on automated CV screening tools that filter candidates based on keywords rather than genuine capability—an approach that frustrates both recruiters and applicants, and one that became acutely visible during the pandemic-era hiring surge. Popp AI's three co-founders—Sam Dhesi, James Cochrane-Dyet, and Ilyes Benmansour—built the company in direct response to those inefficiencies. Dhesi previously served as Head of Emerging Technology to the UK Government during the COVID-19 response, giving him first-hand experience of what happens when hiring processes fail under pressure.

The platform allows organisations to conduct open-ended, asynchronous conversations with candidates at scale via AI. Rather than presenting tick-box questions, it engages applicants in dialogue, captures their answers, automatically analyses the content, and ranks candidates by fit—all while maintaining a personalised experience that, according to the company, is meaningfully different from being routed through a chatbot. The result is faster decision-making for hiring managers and a candidate experience that more closely resembles a genuine screening conversation than a form submission.

Popp AI is targeting enterprise recruitment teams where volume is high and the cost of a poor hire is significant. The company reports positive momentum with enterprise clients ahead of this round, and the proceeds are earmarked for both deepening its AI capabilities—particularly around dynamic, multi-turn candidate interactions—and expanding its commercial footprint across talent functions and recruitment marketplace platforms. The global recruitment software market is large and growing, driven by persistent talent scarcity and increasing HR technology spend across enterprise organisations.

Jan Lynn-Matern from Emerge described the future of hiring as one where intelligent solutions make processes more human rather than less, citing Popp AI's approach as aligned with that direction of travel. Ferdinand Reynolds from SuperSeed Ventures highlighted a strong year of product development and go-to-market refinement since the pre-seed round as the basis for co-leading the seed. The company plans to use its expanded resources to continue broadening the platform's capability and to establish Popp AI as a standard tool within enterprise talent acquisition workflows.

Sources