Avery has raised €300,000 in pre-seed funding to transform how companies hire and eliminate the costly impact of mis-hires. The round was led by Builders Startup Studio, a Rotterdam-based venture builder focused on technology-driven solutions.
This funding will help Avery advance its technology, onboard more customers, and lay the groundwork for expansion into key European markets. The company’s intelligence-first platform challenges the traditional recruitment industry by focusing on role validation, semantic understanding, and predictive hiring — long before resumes are screened.
Recruitment inefficiency costs companies €50,000 per bad hire, with mis-hire rates reaching 20% in fast-scaling businesses. For a company making 50 hiring mistakes, that adds up to €500,000 in losses — not including the hidden costs of lost momentum and team instability.
"Everyone's obsessed with making hiring faster, but speed isn't the problem – intelligence is," says Alisher Jafarov, founder and CEO of Avery. "I've built and scaled commercial teams at multiple international companies, and I've seen firsthand how traditional hiring cripples growth. And now the market is flooded with tools that just add AI layers on top of broken processes."
Avery flips traditional hiring on its head by focusing on intelligence-first hiring. Instead of starting with a job posting and keyword-based screening, Avery validates the role itself, ensuring requirements align with real market data before a single resume is reviewed.
The platform’s semantic technology also reads between the lines, understanding that a ‘Full-Stack Developer’ at a startup might be labeled a ‘Software Engineer’ at a corporate — or that valuable ‘growth marketing’ experience could be hidden under a ‘digital campaign manager’ title.
"Traditional hiring is blind – companies post jobs ads without knowing if their requirements make sense, screen candidates without understanding market realities, and make offers without market insights," explains Marco Dubbeld, co-founder and CTO of Avery. "We've built something revolutionary: true semantic understanding of careers. While others match keywords, our AI reads between the lines."
The €300K pre-seed will accelerate Avery’s presence in the Netherlands, the UK, Ireland, and the DACH region — markets known for their fast-scaling companies and fierce competition for top talent.
Avery targets companies with 200 to 1,000 employees in sectors like technology, professional services, and scale-ups — businesses where a single wrong hire can derail ambitious growth plans.
Avery was founded by Alisher Jafarov and Marco Dubbeld, who saw firsthand how flawed hiring processes block company growth. Their solution focuses not on speeding up recruitment but on ensuring every hire is the right hire from the start.
The company already works with 25 early adopters across six countries, who are using Avery to identify hiring gaps, predict candidate success, and prevent costly misalignments.
The pre-seed round was secured through Builders Startup Studio, a venture studio that partners with founders to launch scalable, tech-driven companies. Builders supports Avery with funding, mentorship, and strategic advice as the company prepares for its next funding round.
"By 2030, we aim to power at least 5,000 companies with intelligence-first hiring and prevent €1 billion in mis-hire costs," says Jafarov. "But for us, it’s about more than just savings. We're creating a future where hiring is precise, seamless, and powered by intelligence – helping companies build the teams that will drive tomorrow's innovations."
