Perfectly

Lien Chueh, Sviatoslav Dvoretskii, and the rest of the Perfectly team spent years building large-scale recommender systems at TikTok and Meta—systems that processed billions of data points to figure out what you wanted to watch next. Now they're pointing that same machine learning firepower at recruiting, and they just became the first AI-native recruiting agency to come out of Y Combinator.

Here's the problem with startup recruiting: it takes forever, costs a fortune, and half the time you're interviewing people who looked good on paper but can't actually code. Perfectly flips that whole thing on its head. They're not just posting job listings and hoping for the best—they're using the same recommendation muscle that made TikTok addictive to match you with candidates who actually fit what you need. Days, not weeks. That's the pitch, and with YC behind them, people are listening.

The recruiting industry is absolutely massive and notoriously broken for startups. Traditional agencies charge 15-20 percent of salary, move slow, and have zero skin in the game. If these former TikTok and Meta ML scientists can apply their recommendation chops to talent matching the way they did to content consumption, they've got a real shot at making that old model look like it's held together with duct tape and prayers. Perfectly just raised the bar for what AI-native recruiting actually means.