Whenever there’s a mention of a company using AI, the default perception is that it’s a copilot or an assistant that generates, summarizes, or surfaces insights from a company’s data backend.
The idea isn’t misplaced, but the actual role of AI inside enterprises is evolving fast. A new wave of startups has productionized AI to perform tasks far more complex than content generation, transforming entire people processes and rewiring how teams hire, engage, and develop talent.
Just a few years ago, HR was largely manual, from hiring talent to nurturing it. Today, with AI in the mix, companies aren’t just automating job postings and workflows for efficiency. They’re using intelligence to interpret human potential, find the right people for the right roles, read between the lines of performance reviews to detect burnout, uncover hidden skills, and suggest the next project, mentor, or learning path in real time.
These capabilities are pushing HR beyond administration into a new era of augmentation, where algorithms act as copilots for people leaders, helping them turn their organizations into smarter, fairer entities.
Below, we spotlight five founders pioneering that shift. Together, they represent a new kind of innovation in HR tech, one that makes work efficient as well as deeply human and personalized.
Barb Hyman
Founder & CEO, Sapia.ai
What she’s doing:
Barb Hyman’s Sapia is replacing subjective interviews with structured, AI-led conversations. Recruiters use Sapia’s agent to refine job descriptions and convert them into competency models that define what to look for in an ideal candidate. Based on these models, the system designs structured interviews that assess each applicant’s skills, competencies, and motivations — all while ensuring inclusivity.
When candidates respond, the AI analyzes the information, along with their language and tone, to build a 360-degree profile that highlights fit, potential, and drive. The outcome is faster, fairer hiring decisions and a process that feels distinctly human, not mechanical like automated screening interviews.
Why Barb is crushing it:
- Sapia’s AI has conducted over 1M interviews, reducing time-to-hire by 50% and saving 20 hours per week per recruiter, all while ensuring 90% candidate satisfaction.
- The company’s system is used by major employers like BT Group, Randstad, Hudson, Starbucks, Qantas, and Woolworths Group to reduce hiring bias at scale.
- It has also raised close to $30M so far, with the last round led by Macquarie Capital and Woolworths Group’s W23 venture capital arm.
- On the technology front, Sapia recently enhanced its Hire Brilliant system with Job Analysis Studio, which creates explainable interviews using 25+ validated skills or an organization-specific framework in 50+ languages.
- It also launched Phai, a mobile-first AI career coach for job seekers.
Where you may have read about Barb:
- Sapia.ai Raises $17 Million in Series A Round
- Humanizing hiring at scale: Lessons from 1 million AI interviews
- Job interview analysis platform Sapia launches generative AI chatbot to explain its hiring decisions
Roxanne Petraeus
Co-founder & CEO, Ethena
What she’s doing:
From serving as an engineer for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan to modernizing corporate learning, Roxanne Petraeus has come a long way. Her company, Ethena, is today redefining how employees engage with compliance, DEI, and ethics training, making it actually enjoyable for them.
Ethena’s Learning Management System uses AI to deliver personalized micro-learning experiences that feel like social content rather than ‘tick box’ corporate modules. Its system adapts tone, examples, and pacing based on engagement data, ensuring every employee’s learning path is relevant and resonant. For HR teams, the platform’s AI analytics provide cultural insight, showing where knowledge gaps, sentiment shifts, or compliance risks may emerge across the organization.
Why Roxanne is crushing it:
- Ethena has built a library of 200+ training courses spanning topics like harassment prevention, anti-money laundering, cybersecurity, and code of conduct, with a 93% approval rating from over 2M learners.
- The company has raised close to $50M with a $30 million Series B led by Felicis Ventures and multiple other VCs.
- Ethena’s platform to reinvent workplace education is being used by companies like Figma, Notion, Asana, Zendesk, Pinterest, and Synaptics.
- In 2025, the company launched an integrated Ethics Hotline + Case Management module and a built-in phishing-simulation tool, both leveraging AI to track and respond to compliance incidents.
- It has also developed an AI policy bot that uses an organization’s specific policies to help employees do the right thing in plain, helpful language.
Where you may have read about Roxanne:
- Compliance training platform Ethena raises $15.5M in series A
- Ethena, which sends bite-sized nudges for compliance training, shifts its focus amid new capital
- This compliance tech founder wanted to make compliance training less boring and more memorable
Jeremy Johnson
Co-founder and ex-CEO, Andela
What he’s doing:
Before remote work was a global norm, Jeremy Johnson envisioned it as a path to inclusion. His company, Andela, today connects thousands of talented software engineers from Africa and emerging economies with global companies through AI-based matching.
Its model uses data from assessments, project histories, and collaboration behavior to pair developers with roles they’ll thrive in, transforming how distributed teams are built without biases.
Why Jeremy is crushing it:
- He built Andela into a unicorn valued at $1.5B, with more than $380M in venture funding by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Spark Capital, and others.
- The company has established a talent pool of 150,000 pre-vetted engineers across 135 countries, all accessible to the digital workforce of global companies.
- A 2024 Forrester study found Andela’s adaptive hiring platform cut time-to-hire by 66%, reduced project timelines by 33%, and delivered a 97% ROI for customers.
- In 2025, Andela also expanded its AI talent platform to include data science and AI engineering roles, going beyond software development. It also partnered with GitHub to train 3,000 technologists in AI coding skills.
Where you may have read about Jeremy:
- The total economic impact of Andela
- Engineering talent outsourcing firm Andela lands $200
- Andela and CNCF’s Kubernetes African Developer Training Program Trains more than 5,600 African Technologists on Cloud Native Skills
Willson Cross
Co-founder, Borderless AI
What he’s doing:
Willson is building Borderless AI, an AI-powered platform disrupting the global HR industry. The company’s Employer of Record (EOR) service allows businesses to hire, manage, and pay international workers in over 170 countries without setting up local legal entities.
Recently, it introduced Alberni, an AI agent that automates complex processes like generating compliant employment contracts, managing payroll, and answering complex HR queries, often reducing a task’s completion window from weeks to just minutes.
Why Sean is crushing it:
- Borderless AI raised $27M seed funding in 2024, one of the largest early-stage rounds in HR tech, led by Susquehanna and Aglaé Ventures. This was followed by a $5M seed extension with participation from the co-founders of the AI company Cohere.
- The Cohere partnership led to the launch of Alberni “autonomous HR agent,” trained on global labor laws and localization frameworks, to handle real-world onboarding and management across borders.
- In 2025, the company announced integrations with Workday, Rippling, and Deel APIs, allowing enterprises to unify HR workflows under one AI assistant.
- Currently, Borderless AI’s platform processes payroll in 90+ currencies, and claims customers see 100% payroll delivery accuracy and up to 90% reduction in admin hours when switching from legacy EOR providers.
Where you may have read about Willson:
- Borderless AI secures $32 million to challenge HR software giants with its AI-powered platform
- Borderless AI: Redefining Global HR and Payroll Solution in 2025
- Borderless AI Launches AI Agent for Human Resources with Cohere
Dr. Tina Ruseva
Founder & CEO, Mentessa
What she’s doing:
Dr. Tina Ruseva founded Mentessa, an AI-driven platform designed to build a “connected learning culture” in the workplace. The company’s software maps each employee’s skills, passions, and goals and then automatically matches them with mentors, peers, or internal projects, helping organizations break down silos, set up a dynamic culture of continuous learning and collaboration, and move beyond traditional top-down HR hierarchies.
Why Tina is crushing it:
- Tina bootstrapped Mentessa for over two years before raising its first €1 million round in 2022 from Eleven Ventures to scale the platform.
- Since then, the company has added major enterprise clients, including Deutsche Telekom, Linde, and OTP Bank.
- Mentessa earned NASDAQ’s endorsement for advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals and creating equal opportunities in the workplace.
- In 2024, it secured an EU grant to pilot an “intelligent skills agent,” signaling a strong push into advanced AI.
- Most recently, Mentessa launched its Impact Partner Program to build a pan-European skills ecosystem and accelerate market expansion.
Where you may have read about Tina:
- Munich-based Mentessa raises €1 million to change the way we work
- Follow-up: How are things going at Mentessa?
Whenever there’s a mention of a company using AI, the default perception is that it’s a copilot or an assistant that generates, summarizes, or surfaces insights from a company’s data backend. The idea isn’t misplaced, but the actual role of AI inside enterprises is evolving fast. A new wave of startups has productionized AI to perform tasks far more complex than content generation, transforming entire people processes and rewiring how teams hire, engage, and develop talent. Just a few years AI, Home, News, Popular, AI in HR, Andela, Barb Hyman, Borderless AI, Dr. Tina Ruseva, Ethena, future of work, HR technology, Jeremy Johnson, Mentessa, people analytics, Roxanne Petraeus, Sapia.ai, talent acquisition AI, Willson Cross
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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