Esteemed Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has backed U.K.-based startup Dex, which aims to revolutionize recruitment through advanced artificial intelligence capabilities.
Dex, created by former Atomico veterans CTO Harry Uglow and CEO Paddy Lambros, employs AI-driven technology designed to streamline talent matchmaking and enhance candidate-company relationships. The platform aims to greatly improve employee retention by matching professionals closely to roles aligned with their skillsets, ambitions, and cultural preferences.
Having attracted roughly two dozen British tech companies, including at least two well-known unicorns, Dex currently remains in a closed beta phase, focusing on refining its systems ahead of a full public release anticipated later this year.
The London-headquartered startup announced a successful $3.1 million pre-seed financing round, led by a16z’s Speedrun fund along with participation from London’s Concept Ventures. Notable individual investors include Meta board member Charlie Songhurst, Deliveroo COO Eric French, Incident.io CEO Stephen Whitworth, Notion Capital’s Kamil Mieczakowski, and former Atomico partner Bryce Keane.
Dex differentiates itself from competitors by adopting a personalized “AI voice talent agent” approach. The system interacts with candidates directly to gain insight into their previous experiences, particular skills, goals, job preferences, and expectations. Using gathered data, Dex strategically identifies and recommends suitable opportunities, prepares candidates for interviews, and even negotiates job offers.
Dex is designed to help both passive job seekers—those not actively searching but open to suitable opportunities—and active job hunters. It continuously tracks employment listings that match candidate preferences, delivering timely alerts tailored precisely to defined interests. For active job-seekers, Dex automates the entire job search and application process, eliminating the need for traditional resumes and lengthy cover letters.
CEO Paddy Lambros commented on Dex’s purpose: “We believe candidates don’t want to waste time sifting through countless generic job posts. Dex handles the searching, saving valuable hours spent scrolling and applying.”
The AI platform also provides candidates with extensive preparation, including personalized interview coaching and relevant compensation benchmarks drawn from comprehensive market data. According to Lambros, Dex’s insights were honed from extensive discussions with more than fifty leading UK recruitment professionals, whose expertise and recruitment practices heavily influenced Dex’s approach.
Dex is powered by multiple large language models from influential developers, including OpenAI, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s Llama, continually adjusted and refined according to each platform’s latest enhancements.
For hiring teams, Dex similarly engages in detailed dialogue to pinpoint characteristics of the ideal candidate, capturing not only technical skills but also softer indicators such as values, cultural alignments, and long-term career goals. These personalized data inputs are then combined with publicly available market information to enable highly customized candidate matching.
With its newly acquired funding, Dex intends to expand its engineering and marketing teams and prepare for its full-scale launch initially in the U.K. market, followed by an eventual international rollout.
“Hiring is not just about filling vacancies; it’s about establishing lasting relationships between companies and their employees,” Lambros said. “With this investment, we are committed to helping businesses retain outstanding talent while empowering individuals to discover meaningful opportunities aligned with their ambitions.”
