We’re delighted to announce that we’re co-leading the £3.6M seed round of Popp AI, the conversational AI platform for enterprise recruitment, alongside SuperSeed, who first backed the company at pre-seed in 2023. Popp is a natural fit for our Navigate thesis: helping people find the right jobs, and companies the right talent.
We’ve known this team since well before the round. We found Popp early, at pre-seed, and did what we always try to do first: helped – opening doors to pilot customers and staying close while the product found its feet. So we’ve watched up close what this founding team is made of. CEO Sam Dhesi served as the UK government’s head of emerging technology during Covid-19; co-founder James Cochrane-Dyet was chief of staff to the NHS crisis team. They watched rigid, impersonal recruitment processes fail both employers and candidates right when human connection, and efficiency, mattered most. They’ve built Popp to fix it.
Popp engages candidates in open-ended dialogue at scale, then automatically analyses and ranks responses to surface what hiring teams actually need to know. Recruitment has spent a decade optimising for throughput; Popp’s bet is that the next decade belongs to teams who can talk to every candidate properly, not just process them.
“Talent is everywhere; opportunity isn’t. Every candidate binned by a keyword filter is human potential the labour market never bothered to discover – at enterprise scale, that’s millions of people a year. Popp replaces the filter with a real conversation: the fairest, fastest method that hiring has ever been able to offer. When people find the right work, it changes lives.”
Jan, Emerge
The round will fund growth across enterprise recruitment teams, talent departments and recruitment marketplaces.
Sam, James, Ilyes – you’re hired (Or is it you who’s hired us?)
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