{"id":101452,"title":"Prism: AI-Native Recruiting Agency","tagline":"Prism 🔍 AI-native recruiting agency The highest-scoring people search ever benchmarked, plugged into an agency that hands you hires ready to interview.","body":"Hey everyone 👋\n\nWe're [Theo](https://www.linkedin.com/in/theokitsberg/) and [Axel](https://www.linkedin.com/in/axellapira/) — cofounders of [Prism](https://tryprism.com/).\n\n**TL;DR**\n\nPrism is an AI-native recruiting agency. You brief us on a Slack channel. We source, engage, and screen the candidates. You step in to interview and make the offer. You pay 15% of first-year salary when someone we find signs.\n\nThe engine underneath is the best people search in the world. We score 89.6 on the Public Sourcing Benchmark. This puts us 21+ points ahead of every published baseline and the benchmark was built and published by one of our direct competitors.\n\n**Ask:** Hiring, or know someone who is? Reply here, DM, or grab a slot: \u003chttps://cal.com/theokitsberg/30mins\u003e\n\n❌ **The Problem**\n\nHiring is a company killer. Founders spend a third of their time on it. Bad hires cost more than missed quarters. Good hires change companies.\n\nAnd yet the work itself is brutal. Inbound is 95% noise. Outbound competes with everyone else's outbound. Agencies are slow, expensive, and opaque. Software dumps thousands of half-relevant profiles on your desk and walks away.\n\nThe hardest part of hiring isn't picking the tool. It's doing the work.\n\n🛠️ **Our Solution: an AI-native agency, built on the best people search in the world**\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=101452\u0026key=user_uploads/2051069/8aca8a76-91fb-41f6-9312-59e3c9e7e2af)\n\n**The best people search, independently verified.** 89.6 on the Public Sourcing Benchmark. 21+ points clear of the next system. The benchmark was built and published by Lessie, one of our direct competitors. The judge is Gemini, not us. The methodology was pre-registered and the queries and harness are public. Anyone can reproduce it. Read the full paper here: tryprism.com/papers/people-search-benchmark.pdf\n\n**Calibration, not just keywords.** We extract the hidden hiring criteria buried in your JD and your past hires. A few thumbs-up / thumbs-down on early candidates and the search converges fast.\n\n**Outreach that converts.** We engage candidates across LinkedIn, email, and WhatsApp, with messages calibrated to the role and the person.\n\n**Scale agencies physically can't match.** We run dozens of searches in parallel today, every step instrumented. A traditional agency on a senior role has one human reading 20 profiles at a time. We read the whole web at once and use human time only where it actually matters.\n\n**You brief us on Slack. We hand you a shortlist.** You handle the parts a founder should, which in our view are the interviews and the offer. Everything else is on us.\n\n**Pricing:** $500 retainer to kick off a search. 15% of first-year salary when someone we find signs.\n\n👬 **The Team**\n\n**Theo (CEO)** — Cambridge dropout. Built and ran recruiting and training for a UK crisis helpline. Published research with MIT’s Media Lab.\n\n**Axel (CTO)** — Oxford dropout. Previously founder associate at Alan, the French healthtech unicorn, where he worked on internal recruiting infra.\n\n(+ an **amazing founding engineer** and **amazing in-house recruiter**, both hired with Prism!)\n\n🙏 **Our Ask**\n\n🔵 **Hiring?** Run a search with us. Reply, DM, or grab a slot: \u003chttps://cal.com/theokitsberg/30mins\u003e\n\n🔵 **Looking for your next role?** Meet Ray, our AI career advisor. One conversation and we'll match you with companies hiring people like you. Free [here](https://tryprism.com/?view=candidates), takes a few minutes\n\nThanks!\n\nTheo \u0026amp; Axel","slug":"QOK-prism-ai-native-recruiting-agency","created_at":"2026-05-18T17:13:33.801Z","updated_at":"2026-05-25T05:31:49.283Z","total_vote_count":7,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/QOK-prism-ai-native-recruiting-agency","share_image_url":"//bookface-static.ycombinator.com/assets/ycdc/yc-og-image-c440a0ad1dacfb86eeeb343717479cc54d256614449b4ef719977a0a451f8bc8.png","company":{"id":30944,"name":"Prism","slug":"tryprism","url":"https://tryprism.com/","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/6e52603aa2143dd9017a5e541c9233008c5afe63.png","batch":"Spring 2026","industry":"B2B","tags":["Recruiting","HR Tech","Talent Acquisition","AI"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/30944"}}