Woo lands $7 million and launches an AI headhunter

Woo — a marketplace that matches employers and passive job seekers — has today announced it has landed $7 million in series A funding. Along with that new round, it has also launched a new AI-powered bot, Helena, that has a few impressive tricks up its digital sleeve.

Helena automatically scouts the best candidates, matching them to your organization and available roles. But the bot goes further than that. It approaches those candidates once they have been discovered, acting as a corporate headhunter.

But Helena also completes the recruitment circle by acting as the job seeker’s agent. Effectively, it works on behalf of the company and the passive job seeker at the same time, sparing both parties the need to search for each other actively.

Powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, Helena is more than just a bot. It provides useful data and analytics that can help employers to optimize their job openings.

The solution offers real-time visibility into how job seekers react to open roles, including the reasons they may have passed on a position, and it provides benchmark data against companies similar to the one hiring.

Woo claims that Helena performs almost 3 times better than recruiting agencies, for whom about 20 percent of
sourced candidates move on to interviews. Early results show that 52 percent of candidates sourced by Helena move on to the interview stage, which is impressive. And it also claims the bot is 20 times better than job boards.

In addition to the product launch, Woo’s $7 million series A investment round takes its total funding to $11.4 million. The funds will be used to enhance the company’s technology and fuel its U.S. expansion. The round was led by Lord David Alliance, with participation from existing investors.

With offices in Tel Aviv and San Francisco, Woo was founded in 2015 by Liran Kotzer and Ami Dudu and works with brands such as WeWork, Lyft, Uber, Microsoft, Quora, and Asana.

Woo’s new AI-powered headhunter/agent is available now via the company’s website.