Dex, founded by a former Atomico talent adviser, earns agency fees from employers only after successful hires and has achieved $1.8 million ARR in less than six months of charging.
Paddy Lambros, who spent two and a half years advising about 100 European startups on hiring at Atomico, observed that most significant issues at early-stage companies stemmed from hiring choices. Incorrect hires or prolonged unfilled roles could cause promising companies to stall.
This insight led to the creation of Dex, an AI talent agent specializing in technical recruitment, founded by Lambros in early 2025. The London-based startup secured a $5.3 million seed round led by Notion Capital, with contributions from a16z Speedrun, Concept Ventures, and angel investors from OpenAI and other firms, as announced on Monday.
This new funding takes the total capital raised to $8.4 million, following a $3.1 million pre-seed last year.
What Does Dex Do?
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Dex concentrates on a specific part of the technical job market: AI researchers, software developers, and machine learning and quantitative engineers.
Over 15,000 engineers have joined the platform, and more than 50 tech companies, including Lovable, ElevenLabs, Synthesia, Granola, and Fyxer, are using the service.
Since starting to charge in late 2025, Dex has reached approximately $1.8 million in annualized recurring revenue. Lambros considers year-end profitability as “possible.”
The process starts with a conversation, via voice or text, with Dex’s AI agent, which asks open-ended questions about the candidate’s background, motivations, and ambitions.
The agent, utilizing models from Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI, then matches candidates with relevant job roles, helps them research companies, benchmarks salaries, and prepares them for interviews.
On the matching end, Dex employs what Lambros calls ‘old-school machine learning,’ a unique engine that utilizes the detailed profiles created through AI interactions to present candidates to employers. When there is mutual interest, Dex introduces the candidate to the hiring manager.
The business operates on an agency model rather than a SaaS model, charging employers a success fee of 20–30% of the hired candidate’s first-year salary, similar to a traditional executive search firm. “We only earn money if we do a good job,” Lambros stated.
This fee model serves as both a strategic decision and a proposal to employers looking for more accountability in their hiring processes compared to software subscriptions with no outcome guarantees.
Lambros argues that AI, capable of engaging in sustained, contextually-rich conversations, makes agency functions genuinely automatable and potentially more effective than their human counterparts on a larger scale.
An AI agent can interact with hundreds of thousands of candidates and serve thousands of clients simultaneously, unlike a human recruiter.
The depth of private data shared with a conversational agent is richer than what candidates typically include on public platforms like LinkedIn.
This data asymmetry is Dex’s core product thesis: the match quality depends on the richness of the candidate model, and most existing tools rely on shallow, public data.
The seed funding will support opening offices in New York and San Francisco in late 2026, positioning the company in a highly competitive AI engineering market.
Lambros’ previous experience, including talent expansion at Improb