Ezra, a voice AI interviewing platform focused on transforming hiring through structured voice conversations, announced it has raised $3.2 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Penny Jar Capital and LMNT Ventures, with participation from a16z Speedrun and Telegraph Hill Capital.
The funding comes as recruiting teams face surging application volumes and increasing difficulty identifying qualified candidates. According to the company, application volume has nearly tripled since 2021, with recruiters often screening more than 1,000 applications per role. The rise of AI-generated resumes and synthetic candidate profiles has further complicated the hiring process, making traditional resume screening less effective.
Ezra’s platform aims to address this challenge by conducting structured voice interviews with every applicant. This approach allows recruiters to evaluate candidates based on consistent, role-specific criteria while giving applicants an opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities through conversation rather than keyword optimization.
The company reports that enterprise customers using its platform have achieved significant efficiency gains, including saving up to 75% of screening time and interviewing up to six times as many qualified candidates compared to traditional hiring workflows.
Founded by Ophir Samson, a second-time AI voice entrepreneur with a PhD in applied mathematics, Ezra builds on years of research in voice AI, machine learning, and natural language processing. Samson previously worked on scaling teams at Uber and Aurora and has focused on developing systems that move beyond surface-level candidate screening.
Ezra integrates into existing hiring workflows by allowing recruiting teams to customize interview criteria and automatically conduct structured voice conversations with applicants. The platform also includes features such as structured scoring, cheat detection, and applicant tracking system integrations, helping reduce manual effort while improving candidate evaluation.
The company positions its solution as a response to a shifting hiring landscape where traditional signals like resumes are becoming less reliable, emphasizing the need for more authentic, human-centered evaluation methods at scale.
KEY QUOTES:
“Application volume has exploded because AI has made it trivial to generate polished resumes and fake identities, and recruiters are missing qualified candidates in the noise. It’s accelerating as these AI tools get better, more applications flood in, and the old playbook of resume screening becomes useless. We built Ezra so our customers can stop playing the resume lottery.”
Ophir Samson, Founder And CEO Of Ezra
“Ophir was built to lead in the AI renaissance. For over a decade, we’ve watched Ophir master a wide range of fields, driven by his curiosity and an unmatched will to invent, build and iterate. Ezra is a culmination of his work, combining his expertise in the science of AI and the art of relationships to reinvent hiring at scale.”
Bryant Barr, Founding Partner At Penny Jar Capital
“At a moment when surface-level screening is becoming less reliable by the day, Ezra helps identify true signal for ‘needle-in-the-haystack’ talent. Ezra’s proprietary models are at the bleeding edge of Voice AI and power an interview experience that is step-functions ahead of any other solutions in the market. That, combined with Ophir’s unusually sharp understanding of both recruiter and candidate needs, led to a product that feels intuitive, human, and genuinely delightful to use.”
Jeff Miller, Founding Partner At LMNT Ventures
“We backed Ezra from Day 0 because we believed in Ophir’s vision that hiring in a post-AI era is broken and needs to get rebuilt around real human signal vs surface level resumes. From our first meeting, it was clear Ophir was a special founder with both the technical IQ to build innovative voice AI, as well as the EQ to design for recruiters and candidates. It’s been a pleasure to work with the team over the course of a16z Speedrun, and we couldn’t be more excited about the future.”
Jonathan Lai, General Partner At Andreessen Horowitz
