Take2 AI, an AI-powered job simulation platform for sales recruiting, announced it has raised a $3 million seed round led by Reach Capital and SemperVirens. Other Silicon Valley-based venture funds, Techstars, and HR leaders from Visa, Disney, HP, and Google participated.
Take2 AI aims to reinvent how companies recruit talent for high-volume sales roles, which account for roughly 14% of all jobs in the U.S. Employers spend countless hours reviewing applications and struggle to assess candidates’ viability effectively. This results in high short-term attrition: one in three salespeople churns annually, three times more than any other occupation.
Take2 AI solves this issue by generating tailor-made simulations of real-world sales scenarios that help vet job applicants for skills, behavioral attributes, and culture fit. By leveraging generative AI, Take2 AI recreates company and role-specific sales scenarios that immerse job applicants in the role and provide high-signal performance data to employers.
The company’s founders, Kaushik Narasimhan and Yaniv Shimoni, met at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and have deep expertise in building and scaling sales teams. They started Take2 AI based on insights from research on skills-based hiring they conducted at Stanford University.
One of Take2’s customers (a large solar energy company) saw the 90-day attrition of their sales representatives fall from 58% to 15% within four months of using Take2 AI. And this had a significant impact, enabling them to build their sales team faster and hit quota and reducing their time-to-hire by eliminating two rounds of interviews from their recruiting process.
KEY QUOTES:
“There has been so much buzz around skills-based hiring in recent years, yet most employers still heavily rely on resumes. In high-volume sales roles particularly, resumes are not helpful at predicting fit, leading to extremely high short-term attrition.”
– Yaniv Shimoni, co-founder at Take2 AI
“Take2 is enabling organizations to easily assess on-the-job skills and creates a compelling experience for candidates to showcase their abilities through job simulations. Easy to set up, scalable, thoughtful integration of Gen AI – Take2 AI hits all the keynotes. This is the kind of HR tech we need and want.”
– Prasad Setty, former Vice President of People Operations at Google
“Skills-based hiring tools play a critical role in realigning incentives of employers and employees. Take2 AI is improving hiring outcomes and creating new pathways for candidates that might be otherwise overlooked in the hiring process.”
– Allison Baum Gates, General Partner at SemperVirens
“We are very bullish on skill-based hiring. Take2 AI brings a novel approach to recruiting that is scalable and timely given the advancements in Generative AI. Being able to put candidates in front of real-world sales simulations results in better assessment of candidates for companies and better fit for employees, leading to a win-win and clear ROI to both parties.”
– Esteban Sosnik, General Partner at Reach Capital
