Dex just raised $5.3 million from Notion Capital, a16z Speedrun, and Concept Ventures. They have 15,000 engineers on the platform and 50 paying customers including Lovable, ElevenLabs, and Synthesia. Annualized revenue run rate: roughly $1.8 million.
If you sell anything to fast-growing AI companies, this is your prospect list for the next six months.
Here's what the funding means for your pipeline and how to build the list before your competitors do.
Dex is a signal, not a competitor
Dex calls itself an "AI talent agent." Candidates talk to an AI agent by voice or text. The agent asks about experience, motivations, ambitions. Then it surfaces roles, helps with research, benchmarks comp, and preps for interviews.
Dex charges employers 20-30% of a hired candidate's salary. Same fee structure as traditional executive search firms. They only get paid when they place someone.
Founder Paddy Lambros spent two and a half years at Atomico advising 100 European startups. His observation: nearly every business problem at a young company traced back to a hiring decision. Wrong people in the role. Right people missing. Companies grinding to a halt.
Dex is solving that for a specific slice of the market: AI researchers, software developers, ML and quantitative engineers.
If you sell recruitment software, HR tools, or employer branding services, you might see Dex as competition. Don't.
Dex explicitly does not sell to recruiters. Lambros told Fortune: "On the client side, we're not building software for clients. We're not building an integration for their ATS. What they really want are great candidates."
They're a placement agency with an AI front-end. Not an ATS replacement. Not a sourcing tool. Not a CRM.
Your prospects are the companies using Dex to hire. Those companies are growing, well-funded, and desperate for talent. That makes them excellent sales targets for almost anything else.
50 companies you should be talking to right now
Dex named five customers publicly: Lovable, ElevenLabs, Synthesia, Granola, and Fyxer. The other 45 are unnamed but share the same profile: AI-native startups with serious engineering teams and recent funding.
Here's what we know about the five named companies:
- Lovable — AI-powered app builder. Raised $7.5M seed in 2024. Growing engineering team.
- ElevenLabs — AI voice synthesis. Valued at over $1B. Series B in 2024. Hiring aggressively.
- Synthesia — AI video generation. $90M Series C at $1B valuation. 200+ employees.
- Granola — AI note-taking for meetings. Raised $4.5M seed. Small team scaling.
- Fyxer — AI email assistant. Early stage, building out engineering.
These companies share three traits that make them ideal prospects:
1. They have budget. Every company on that list has raised at least a seed round. ElevenLabs and Synthesia are unicorns. They're spending on tools, infrastructure, and services.
2. They're hiring fast. Dex wouldn't have 15,000 engineers on the platform if demand was low. These companies need people. That means they need everything that supports hiring: recruitment marketing, assessment tools, background checks, onboarding software, collaboration tools.
3. They're early adopters. Companies using an AI talent agent are comfortable with new technology. They're more likely to take meetings with innovative vendors. They're less price-sensitive than traditional enterprises.
If you sell to AI companies, start with the five named customers. Then look for the other 45 by searching LinkedIn for companies that match the profile: AI-native, 10-200 employees, recently funded, hiring for engineering roles.
How to build the list in 30 minutes
You don't need a data team for this. Here's the workflow we'd run:
Step 1: Find the investors. Notion Capital, a16z Speedrun, Concept Ventures. Go to their portfolio pages. Export every AI company they've funded in the last 18 months. That's your seed list.
Step 2: Cross-reference with hiring signals. Use LinkedIn to check which of those companies have open engineering roles. Filter for "AI engineer," "ML engineer," "research scientist." Companies with 5+ open roles are your A-tier prospects.
Step 3: Check funding recency. Companies that raised in the last 6-12 months have budget to spend. Crunchbase and PitchBook are worth the subscription cost for this alone.
Step 4: Look for the pattern. Dex's customers are companies where engineering is the product. Not AI-adjacent. AI-native. If the company's core value proposition isn't built on AI models, they're probably not using Dex.
We wrote about a similar pattern when Series A funding hit $326.5M in a single week. Companies that just raised are 9% more likely to buy. That signal compounds when you layer on active hiring.
What to say when you reach out
Most salespeople will send the same generic email: "Congrats on the funding. Here's our product."
Don't do that.
These founders and hiring managers are drowning in inbound. They get 50+ emails a day from vendors. Generic congratulations get deleted.
Instead, reference the specific challenge Dex is solving for them. Lambros said it clearly: "It was either not having the right people in the role or having the wrong people."
Your email should acknowledge that hiring is their bottleneck and position your product as something that helps them move faster once they have the right people in seats.
Something like:
"You're using Dex to find engineers. Once they're onboarded, our tool helps them ship 2x faster by [specific value prop]. Want to see how it works?"
That email works because it shows you understand their stack. You know they're using Dex. You're not asking them to change their hiring process. You're offering something that complements it.
If you're selling to the engineering team directly, frame it around developer experience and productivity. If you're selling to the CEO or VP of Engineering, frame it around speed to revenue.
We covered a similar approach in our post on Canada's SaaS funding boom. The same principle applies: find the signal, build the list, write the email that shows you did your homework.
What we'd do next
Dex's $5.3M seed round is one signal in a market that's full of them right now. The AI hiring market is hot. The companies using Dex are growing fast. They have budget, they have urgency, and they're open to new tools.
Build the list this week. Send the first batch of emails by Friday. Track which companies respond and which don't. Then iterate.
If you want to automate the prospect research and email drafting part of this workflow, see how MiraReach handles it. We built it for exactly this kind of signal-driven outbound.
— Mira