Klaaryo, a start-up developing a conversational recruitment system based on WhatsApp and AI, has announced that it has closed an investment round worth over €2.1 million.
The lead investor is The Techshop, with co-investor Frontech, the accelerator for frontier technologies of the CDP National Network, which, after an initial investment during the acceleration programme, continues to believe in the project with a follow-on investment, as well as various business angels including Ottavio Maria Campigli with some partners from W Executive, the founders of Hlpy and Paolo Fois, founder and CEO of Lexroom.
The capital will enable Klaaryo to expand its team and accelerate the development of its platform, strengthening its market position, consolidating its presence in Italy and expanding into other European countries. International companies operating in the retail, food service and other high-volume sectors have already chosen Klaaryo to transform recruiting into a strategic lever, including: La Piadineria, Burger King, Happy Casa, Big Mamma Group, Sicuritalia, as well as QSRP (Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, United Kingdom) and Nordsee in Germany. To date, Klaaryo has managed over 300,000 applications, supported thousands of hires and operated in more than 2,000 locations across Europe.
“At Techshop, we have analysed dozens of HRtech companies over the last few years, and we have rarely seen a point solution achieve Klaaryo’s level of product-market fit. The impact on customers’ businesses is immediate: faster pre-screening, recruiters freed from hours of repetitive work, and candidates satisfied with the selection process. The founding team has had the perseverance to refine the product over the last 18 months, creating an AI agent solution that works and creates value,” says Gianluca d’Agostino, founder and managing partner of The Techshop, in a statement.
“With AI, we have transformed recruiting into a results accelerator: hiring times have been drastically reduced, less time is spent on repetitive tasks such as pre-screening and interview management, and we can now focus more on initiatives with greater added value that enhance the professionalism of our colleagues,” says Viola Di Claudio, HR director at La Piadineria. – Klaaryo proved to be the ideal partner, introducing us to a new vision of recruitment and employee management: it understood our need to build and manage workflow, offering us rapid feedback and timely customisation through tailor-made AI agents. A real turning point for both our company and all our employees.
Founded by Federico Pedron, Luca Tamborino Frisari and Luigi Adornetto (pictured), Klaaryo was created with the mission of solving problems faced by the recruitment industry: only 17% of candidates make it to the interview stage; 60% abandon slow processes, 44% if they do not receive a response within 72 hours; one in four rejects the offer due to a poor experience.
These figures show that it is not candidates that are lacking, but rather the processes capable of supporting them, and this is where Klaaryo comes in: its native WhatsApp AI Agent transforms the way companies and people meet and interact. It is a real evolution in the candidate experience: AI agents listen, understand, respond and accompany each person throughout the selection process, creating authentic dialogues consistent with corporate values, simplifying HR processes and enhancing the relationship between people and the organisation.
But the experience does not stop at the selection process. Klaaryo was created to bring conversational intelligence and generative AI to the heart of the digital transformation of HR processes, throughout the entire employee management cycle, from attracting talent to joining the company to full employee engagement, going beyond the simple concept of recruiting.
“This capital increase allows us to accelerate our development at a time when the labour market is undergoing significant changes: on the one hand, 70% of companies are investing in automation and AI not to replace people, but to amplify their decision-making and productive capacity; on the other hand, candidates and employees are demanding better, faster experiences where they feel involved,” explains Federico Pedron, CEO of Klaaryo. . ‘We have entered the era of superworkers: people and organisations empowered by intelligent technologies. This is a transition that the HR world, historically slow to adopt technology, is now facing. Those who lead today will be the ones who attract and retain talent tomorrow.’
Klaaryo’s approach is based on soft skills: it does not just collect process data, but interprets language and conversational behaviour to identify personality traits, motivations, values and relational predispositions. The revolution proposed by Klaaryo is precisely the transition from automation to human understanding, an element that allows companies to evaluate not only skills, but also the potential, mindset and cultural fit of each person. AI thus becomes a tool for empathy, insight and shared growth: every candidate is guaranteed a simple, fast and transparent experience.
In this perspective, the role of the recruiter also changes: from process manager to manager who interprets and decides, supervises conversational agents, reads signals, and builds human relationships when it matters most.
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