Alice.tech, the platform redefining how companies hire and evaluate engineering talent, has announced a $4.2 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, PSV Tech, and angel investors across the US and Europe. Co-founded by Kim Rants, the Berlin-based startup is positioning itself as the intelligent infrastructure for technical hiring - from screening to decision-making.

“We’re not fixing recruiting - we’re rebuilding the whole stack,” said Rants. “The goal is to help companies make faster, fairer, and smarter technical hires using actual data, not gut feelings.”

In a world where traditional hiring pipelines can stretch out for weeks (or months) and technical teams are often misaligned on hiring criteria, Alice.tech aims to offer a faster, standardized, and scalable way to evaluate software engineers - using structured, skill-based assessments and collaborative decision workflows.

---

Why Alice.tech Is Landing at the Perfect Time

The timing couldn’t be better. The global demand for software engineers continues to outpace supply, with over 40 million tech talent shortages projected by 2030 (Korn Ferry, 2024). Hiring great engineers isn’t just a pain point - it’s a business risk.

Companies are stuck juggling noisy resumes, inconsistent interview panels, and outdated ATS tools. Worse, they rely on subjective signals to make six-figure decisions.

That’s where Alice.tech flips the script.

The platform allows engineering teams to collaboratively define what “great” looks like for each role, deploy calibrated assessments based on real-world tasks, and compare candidates with a consistent, merit-first lens.

The result? Less bias, more signal, and dramatically shorter time-to-hire.

---

This Is the Model Smart Founders Should Study

Let’s zoom in for a sec - not just on what Alice.tech is building, but how they’re going to market.

Instead of pushing a one-size-fits-all HR product, Alice.tech focuses on a bottom-up GTM strategy, starting with engineering leaders and hiring managers - the people closest to the pain.

Once teams adopt Alice’s structured workflows and see increased alignment, the platform naturally expands org-wide. This "land-and-expand" approach gives Alice a wedge into high-LTV accounts without bloated enterprise sales cycles.

For early-stage founders, here’s the insight:
Build for the power users who own the problem, not the budget-holders who hear about it. Solve the pain where it’s sharpest, and expansion will follow.

Even more compelling - Alice.tech is stacking usage-based pricing. The more hires you make through the platform, the more you pay. It’s a clean alignment between platform value and customer success - a model many SaaS startups overlook in favor of flat-seat licenses that break down in high-variance orgs.

---

Insight: Your Hiring Workflow Is a Product

Here’s something that’s often missed in talent strategy: every hiring workflow is a funnel. And every funnel is a product experience.

But most startups treat hiring like a black box - slack messages, scattered scorecards, “vibe checks” disguised as culture fit. Alice.tech treats hiring as a designable system. Every stage, from the first outreach to the final decision call, can be tracked, optimized, and improved. Just like onboarding. Just like sales.

Founders: treat hiring like you treat conversion optimization. Where are candidates dropping off? Where is interviewer alignment weakest? What questions correlate with top performers 6 months in?

Alice.tech builds the analytics layer founders need to answer those questions. And in doing so, they move hiring from chaos to clarity.

---

What the Platform Actually Does

Here’s how Alice.tech works under the hood:

• Role calibration: Engineering teams align on success metrics up front - defining which skills matter most for each role.
  
• Assessment engine: Candidates complete real-world technical tasks that mirror the job, not brainteasers or whiteboards.
  
• Structured feedback loops: Interviewers score against defined rubrics inside the platform, not scattered Notion docs or spreadsheets.
  
• Decision dashboards: All signal is centralized, so hiring managers can compare candidates on structured, bias-resistant data.
  

All this builds one clear advantage: velocity. Teams using Alice report cutting their time-to-decision by 40–60%, while improving post-hire performance metrics.

---

Industry Outlook: The New Infrastructure of Hiring

The future of tech hiring is not about adding more sourcing channels or ATS integrations - it’s about rebuilding evaluation itself.

According to Mercer’s 2024 Workforce Trends report, 67% of companies say their technical interviews are “inconsistent” and lead to mis-hires. Meanwhile, bias in hiring remains a top concern, with over 70% of candidates citing unclear evaluations as a red flag.

Alice.tech addresses both issues head-on, offering a structured, repeatable, and auditable process that protects companies from making bad hires - and protects candidates from being unfairly filtered.

This is not an HR tool. It’s technical hiring infrastructure - and it’s going to be indispensable for startups and scaleups alike.

---

What’s Next for Alice.tech

With this funding, Alice.tech plans to expand across Europe and North America, grow its product and customer success teams, and roll out new features aimed at improving interviewer training, DEI analytics, and post-hire performance correlation.

Early adopters include mid-market tech firms, high-growth startups, and engineering orgs burned out by clunky workflows and resume-chasing.

And the team? They’re hiring - on Alice.tech, of course.