Dex

Dex is raising a $5.3M seed round led by Notion Capital. The round builds on the company's pre-seed from a16z Speedrun and Concept Ventures, and will fund team expansion, product development, and the company's go-to-market growth across the UK.

Every business problem traces back to people. As Paddy Lambros puts it: hiring is the main problem of most organisations, getting the right person into the right job is basically the hardest problem you'll solve. Paddy draws a straight line between any critical business failing and the person, or lack thereof, in that role. Yet the trillion-dollar recruitment industry still runs on the same mechanics it always has. Agencies match keywords with human brains. A good recruiter handles three to five placements a month. The cost per hire has risen 40% since 2020. And for the candidate, the person whose career is actually on the line, choosing their next role is left largely to chance.

Dex starts with the candidate, not the employer. An AI agent acts as a career advisor, conducting a conversation to understand what someone actually wants - their motivations, frustrations, salary expectations, and ambitions. Candidates share things with Dex they'd never tell a traditional recruiter, because Dex works for them, not against them. That changes the game entirely. A human recruiter can only know the handful of roles on their desk. Dex can be aware of every relevant opportunity across the market and discuss them in real time. No scheduling delays, no forgotten follow-ups, no partial market coverage. On the employer side, it's simple: a stream of pre-screened, high-quality candidates delivered straight into their existing systems. As Charlie O'Driscoll, Head of Technical Recruitment at Monzo, summed it up: "I don't want agents, dashboards, software - I just want quality candidates."

Dex focuses on the top of the market - lead engineers and senior technologists at the world's best technology companies, AI labs, and quantitative trading firms. These are roles where the right hire is transformational and the willingness to pay reflects that.

Dex is collecting proprietary career data from every conversation: insight into motivations, preferences, and career trajectories that don't exist on LinkedIn or anywhere else. Over time, this becomes a compounding advantage: the more candidates Dex speaks to, the better it understands what makes a great match, and the harder it becomes for anyone else to replicate.

The long-term vision is a personal career agent, one that supports candidates through every job change, promotion, and pivot throughout their working life. Dex isn't replacing recruiters with software. It's replacing the entire model with something that actually works for the person whose career is at stake.