AI recruitment startup hits $1m in annualized revenue in 9 months

CEO Gangesh Pathak (right) and COO Divya Pandey (middle). / Photo credit: OWOW

OWOW, an AI recruitment startup, has said it reached US$1 million in annual recurring revenue in just nine months.

The US-based company also secured backing from angel investors, including a former LinkedIn engineering director and an ex-Intel AI solutions director.

Founded by CEO Gangesh Pathak and COO Divya Pandey in 2024, OWOW uses an AI system named Luna to help recruiters evaluate candidates based on their communication style, performance, and job suitability.

OWOW’s story began when Pathak hosted events right after leaving India for the US. He wanted to build a network in the latter and gain a deeper understanding of its market.

That effort bore fruit, with Pathak now managing a community of around 48,000 founders.

Early on, he set out to help fill a gap in the hiring system across a wide range of industries. He also identified key challenges – such as manually filtering resumes and paying hidden fees imposed by hiring agencies – as problems he aimed to solve with OWOW.

“Agentic AI … can take care of all those processes being done by these traditional methods,” Pathak tells Tech in Asia.

Unlike traditional AI, agentic AI reduces the need for human involvement. That’s because it can act and make decisions independently to reach its goal.

OWOW claims to have carried out over 1,000 interviews daily and vetted more than 400,000 applicants within the first 10 months after its launch.

Eventually, though, Pathak’s end goal is to automate “entire global hiring workflows.”

“I would say our average [hiring] time is 17 days, but we want to bring it down to almost 10 days,” he says.

“We want to automate entire stuff. That’s our goal, so that we can enhance sourcing, vetting, compliance, payroll, and LLM (large language model),” Pathak adds.

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