Announcing Ashby’s $50 Million Series D

In just over a year since our Series C, Ashby has scaled from 1,300 to over 2,700 customers, grown revenue by 135% year-over-year, and increased the number of interviews scheduled through Ashby by 170%. We achieved that growth with best-in-class efficiency — a burn multiple of under 1x — leaving most of our Series C capital untouched.

That combination of rapid growth and discipline sparked pre-emptive interest from investors.

Today, I’m excited to share that we’ve raised a $50 million Series D, led by Mark McLaughlin at Alkeon with co-lead support from existing investor Lachy Groom and participation from F-Prime, Elad Gil, Gaingels, and other new and returning backers. While the round was significantly oversubscribed, $50 million allows us to maintain a healthy valuation (2x our Series C), stay disciplined on dilution, and invest meaningfully in our next phase of growth.

I first connected with Mark in 2021 and was immediately struck by his deep understanding of the HR tech space. Alkeon has backed a number of Ashby customers — including UiPath, Confluent, Zip, AuditBoard, Deepgram, and Verkada — which gave Mark a unique lens into the challenges and opportunities talent teams face as they scale. As a later-stage investor, he brings a perspective that’s increasingly relevant as we grow Ashby into a generational business. We treat adding investors with the same scrutiny as hiring a key executive, and after getting to know Mark over several years, I’m excited to work with him in this next chapter.

Starting with a thank you

It goes without saying that none of this would be possible without the amazing support from our customers. Customer love has been one of the biggest drivers of Ashby’s growth—and this was put nicely by our investors’ observations as they surveyed customers for this round:

“We’ve watched Ashby evolve from a comprehensive applicant tracking system (ATS) to what it is today: the leading intelligent hiring OS powering the most sophisticated talent teams in tech (and increasingly beyond). Through it all, the signal in the noise has been how loved Ashby is by talent teams.”

— Mark Mclaughlin, General Partner at Alkeon Capital Management

“Ashby is clearly setting the pace in recruiting software. Not only through rapid product innovation but through a deeply thoughtful approach to applying AI. It’s rare to see a company so aligned with the needs of its community while also defining the future of its category.”

— Lorenzo Thione, Managing Partner at Gaingels.

Beyond excitement for what we’re building, you all have actively helped shape Ashby through feedback, feature requests, early pilots, and honest conversations about where the product should go next. We’re incredibly grateful for the level of partnership you’ve brought to this journey. Expanding the Ashby community will continue to be a major focus for us going forward.

I also want to give a huge shoutout to the Ashby team. We’ve now crossed 220 employees across 20+ countries, and I couldn’t be more excited about the caliber of execution I see across every function. Customers, Investors, and Partners frequently tell me how surprised they are by how much we’ve been able to build with a relatively small team. Internally, it’s been rewarding to see Ashby become a true talent magnet, letting us grow while maintaining a very high talent bar.

Why now? Three shifts reshaping recruiting

When we started Ashby 6.5 years ago, we observed that TA teams were becoming increasingly sophisticated. Recruiting Operations was growing in relevance, data was becoming central to how TA teams worked, and many teams were investing more in tools and automation.

We saw a gap open up between what TA teams needed and the tools offered on the market. We built Ashby to fill that gap.

Today, we are seeing a number of forces in the market that are once again accelerating the overall pace of change TA teams are facing:

1 | AI usage is moving from novelty to necessity

Gartner now projects that by 2026, more than 60% of recruiting teams will rely on generative-AI copilots to manage high-volume tasks. Yet most AI pilots stall because the underlying data is scattered across point solutions. Platforms that already hold well-structured, end-to-end recruiting data are uniquely positioned to unlock AI’s full value, turning large-language models from clever demos into daily workflow.

2 | Quality of Hire displaces vanity funnel metrics

Talent density is the metric that boards are increasingly paying close attention to over time-to-fill. McKinsey links top performers as being 800% more productive than average performers in the same role; LinkedIn reports that Quality of Hire is the most important metric to HR professionals, but only 33% of respondents felt confident in their reporting methodology. Measuring and communicating Quality of Hire and linking it to talent density is shifting from HR aspiration to a business expectation.

3 | Hiring teams need an operating framework that keeps pace with change

Hiring plans now swing quarter-to-quarter, technology is changing rapidly, and the types of roles companies need are starting to show shifts, too. TA leaders must recalibrate roles, processes, and headcount in real time while still raising the talent bar. They need a practical framework and a tool with the flexibility and scale to adapt in real-time to those changes.

Supporting you in addressing these shifts is a big priority across both our product and our customer-facing teams. That’s why these shifts make up a big portion of our focus areas after this round. Let’s dive into these next!

Where this Series D takes us

Investing in the most powerful, compliant, and thoughtful AI capabilities in the market and the fastest evolving product in TA tech

One of the promises we make to you as an Ashby customer is that you can expect fast and relevant product innovation from us.

We strongly believe that advancements in AI are bringing huge changes to how TA teams operate. In response, we’ve already added a lot of product and engineering bandwidth to ensure that Ashby customers are the first to benefit from the efficiency gains of real-world AI applications.

Ashby is uniquely positioned to embed AI where it truly matters because we already provide an All-In-One platform that delivers ATS, CRM, Scheduling and Analytics.

Today, AI in Ashby already unlocks ways of operating that would have been hard to imagine just two years ago. Here are just a few examples:

• Enabling you to objectively and thoroughly evaluate thousands of candidates in a fraction of the time through AI Application Review. A feature that has already processed millions of resumes, letting recruiters triage in minutes, not days; Jim Miller reviewed 1,500 applications in six hours, a task that would previously have taken several days.
• Complete and immediate context on every aspect of the candidate journey and broader pipeline with AI Candidate Assistant which surfaces next steps, salary expectations, or interview themes instantly. Over 50% of customers already use Ashby AI in daily workflows and adoption is continuing to increase rapidly.
• Communicate thoughtfully with candidates in a fraction of the time with AI feedback summaries and tokens. These help recruiters write thoughtful, personalized candidate update emails and rejections based directly on scorecards, turning a 15-minute task into a 30-second review. 
• Quickly generate insights with AI Reporting Assistant. This makes the advanced reporting in Ashby a lot more accessible to all types of users.

Going forward we’re continuing to make major investments in AI. Our native AI Notetaker will be launching Q3, helping draft feedback forms and bringing the rich data of all conversations your team is having in Ashby and making them easily searchable and accessible to all existing AI capabilities.

AI Talent Rediscovery, launching later this year, will automatically surface candidates across the ATS and CRM who could be a strong fit for newly opened roles, unlocking a historically hard-to-tap source of talent.

Today, most of our AI functionality is assistive. Behind the scenes, we’re laying the groundwork for autonomous & agentic AI features that automate multiple steps of complex tasks - there’s a lot more to come on this front in the coming months!

Across all of our AI investments, we’re continuing to build on top of our five pillars of responsible AI development: Accountability, Transparency, Fairness, Safety, and Privacy & Security.

We want all of our AI functionality to live up to our high product standards and ensure it delivers immediate value to the TA teams we’re supporting.

As Tommy Hansen of Juniper Square says:

“Ashby’s AI really enables us to get back to the roots of recruiting. A lot of people feel like AI’s going to take the human factor out. I have an opposing view on that. I think we’re going to be able to get back to why we all wanted to become recruiters. Ashby's leading the category in AI, and I think you're all just getting started.”

As always, our roadmap extends well beyond AI functionality. We are continuing to deliver on our “all-in-one and best-in-class” promise with continuous improvements across ATS, CRM, Scheduling Automation, and Analytics. Your ongoing feedback is leading to multiple meaningful product updates each week (you can see a full list of recent releases here).

As we have in the past, we intend to stay close to topics that are top of mind for the TA community and address these quickly. As just one example, we’ll be launching a suite of tools to address the increase in candidate fraud many TA teams are seeing in Q3.

We will also ensure that our product updates remain relevant across all of our customer segments. We are adding a lot of functionality for our largest Enterprise customers; at the same time, we’re ensuring that ease of use and streamlined onboarding continue to improve for our earliest stage customers.

Doubling down on Customer Success

In our last fundraising round, we made a note that Customer Success was a big ongoing priority for us.

"Excellent customer success is notoriously hard to scale. We’re committed to spending the time, energy, and money to make it happen."

— Excerpt from “Announcing Ashby’s $30M Series C”

Today, we are proud of the progress we have made in delivering a highly differentiated (and loved) experience for customers. We’re now doubling down on our Customer Success function, through Professional Services for complex roll-outs, publishing weekly Customer Education content, and this month introducing 24/7 human support. We’ve also launched our Ashby Experts program, which provides a network of TA professionals who are deeply skilled at implementing Ashby.

At Ashby, we think of Customer Success as an immediate extension of our product, and we will continue to invest in it as such.

Investing in our Enterprise Segment

When we started Ashby we saw a gap in ATS options for Enterprise customers. They needed to choose between a solution with solid UX that their hiring teams would want to engage with and the customizability that is required to run a large-scale, complex, recruiting operation.

With Ashby, we’ve aimed to bridge that gap. Our Enterprise segment has grown 123% year-over-year. Customers like Shopify and Snowflake are benefiting from Ashby’s advanced customization capabilities and our turnkey Workday integration.

Our Workday integration is a great example of how Ashby can seamlessly fit into a complex Enterprise tech stack. This quarter, we are launching similar integrations with UKG and ADP.

Across both Product and Customer Success, we’re continuing to make investments that make Ashby the ATS of choice for forward-thinking Enterprise TA teams.

Operationalizing Quality of Hire

TA dashboards revolving around time-to-fill, offer-acceptance rates, and cost-per-hire remain useful but deeply incomplete. Because the simple truth is: hiring the wrong person is expensive. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that a single bad hire can cost up to 30% of that person’s first-year salary, putting director-level misfires comfortably north of $60,000.

To tackle this, Ashby is approaching it in stages – to date, a lightweight and customizable survey that requests feedback from hiring managers at 30, 90, and 180 days that then feeds the data straight into Ashby Analytics. Usage of this feature is up 150% since January, and 25% of enterprise customers run live programs. Flock Safety boosted 90-day confidence scores 22% by adding an early technical screen.

I’m excited that we’ve been able to be a significant driver for the adoption of Quality of Hire programs, which historically have been very hard to get off the ground. This will remain a major area of investment for us going forward.

Expanding our Ashby community programs

From our earliest days, the Ashby community has been a priority and grown organically, from our RecOps Community Slack and customer referrals to meetups and feedback calls. What started informally has become one of our strongest signals of long-term impact: when our customers level up, so do we.

This year, we made our biggest investment in community to date. Ashby One, our first customer conference, brought together hundreds of practitioners in San Francisco across a week of sessions, panels, dinners, live streams, and experiential events. We’ve launched new cohorts of our Recruiting Operations and Hiring Excellence courses, created certifications to help customers grow their careers, and expanded our Talent Trends reporting to help teams benchmark where they stand. Our new Ashby Customer Expert (ACE) chapters—live now in Denver and Seattle—give local leaders the tools to host community dinners, share learnings, and stay connected beyond the screen.

Looking ahead, we’re using Series D funding to deepen that investment: expand our ACE chapter reach, scaling our education programs, and growing partnerships with groups like Talent Collective and Growth by Design.

Culture as Compounding Advantage

Since our Series C, we’ve achieved significant growth in key metrics such as our customer base, revenue, product usage and product velocity. The increase in metrics is an important part of the story, but the Ashby culture explains how it is possible. Ashby’s Operating Principles - from Apply First Principles to Thoughtful Communication - drive daily choices and help us to attract candidates who resonate with these principles. We value written, considered communication over meetings, protect focused time, and are frustratingly patient about hiring (and closely monitor our Quality of Hire metrics). 

The result is a team of 220 people across 20+ countries with zero attrition on the original executive leadership team, and a deliberate culture that allows for thoughtful connection and enables everyone to do their best work. If that sounds like your kind of place, good news: We’re hiring across all teams.

Back to Building!

I have touched on this as part of every fundraising round: While it’s exciting to top up the bank account and draw some additional attention to the business, fundraising does not lead to ongoing success in and of itself.

At Ashby, we like to keep distractions to a minimum. So today we’ll briefly enjoy this milestone, but at the same time, we’re already back to work with a strong focus on further improving your overall experience with us.

Once again, thank you for your trust - we’re excited to accelerate our product, community, and most importantly, the impact our users have using Ashby every day.