Rotterdam-based Avery raises €300K to help businesses fix recruitment problem: Here’s how

Rotterdam-based Avery, an AI-powered hiring intelligence platform, has secured €300K in a pre-seed funding round from Builders Startup Studio.

The Dutch company will use the funds to accelerate its expansion across Europe’s high-growth markets, starting in the Netherlands and expanding to the UK, Ireland, and DACH regions.

Currently, the company targets organisations with 200-1000 employees in technology, professional services, and scale-ups – companies where hiring mistakes can make or break growth trajectories.

What does Avery solve?

The hiring crisis is more severe than many think. Companies lose €50,000 for each bad hire, with mis-hire rates at 20 per cent in high-growth firms.

For a typical scale-up making 50 mis-hires, that’s up to €500,000 wasted.

Yet, the €200B recruitment industry continues to offer ineffective solutions like keyword matching and applicant tracking systems.

“Traditional hiring is blind – companies post job 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.

Here’s where Avery comes in.

Avery: Transforming gut feel into data-driven hiring decisions

Founded by Alisher Jafarov and Marco Dubbeld, Avery is a hiring intelligence platform that helps companies hire and develop the right talent through market intelligence and data-driven guidance.

“Everyone’s obsessed with making hiring faster, but speed isn’t the problem – intelligence is,” declares Alisher Jafarov, founder and CEO of Avery. 

The company aims to transform traditional recruitment by providing real-time market validation, intelligent job design, and smart talent matching capabilities.

“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. We’re doing something fundamentally different: using intelligence to validate roles before a single resume is screened, predicting candidate success before interviews begin, and ensuring market alignment before offers go out. It’s not about finding candidates faster – it’s about hiring the right people the first time, every time,” adds Jafarov. 

Early users have found important issues that keyword matching missed, leading to considerable savings.

The platform’s strong understanding of language helps almost all hiring managers find candidates that traditional tools miss.

According to the company, the system keeps improving; every time someone clicks or makes a successful hire, it gets better at finding the right matches.

 “We’ve built something revolutionary: a true semantic understanding of careers. While others match keywords, our AI reads between the lines of both job requirements and candidate profiles. It understands that a ‘Full-Stack Developer’ at a startup might be called a ‘Software Engineer’ at an enterprise, or that ‘growth marketing’ experience could be hidden in a ‘digital campaign manager’ role. This semantic intelligence, combined with real market data, isn’t just making better matches – it’s preventing mis-hires before they happen,” adds Dubbeld.