Avery raises €300K to eliminate costly mis-hires

HRtech startup Avery has raised €300,000 to eliminate the money companies waste in recruitment due to bad hires. 

According to Avery, companies lose €50,000 on every bad hire, with mis-hire rates hitting 20 per cent in high-growth companies.

 For a typical scaleup, making 50 mis-hires leads up to €500,000 wasted on preventable mistakes.

 Yet the €200 billion recruitment industry keeps pushing the same failed solutions: keyword matching, resume databases, fancy ATS and gut-feel decision-making.

"Everyone's obsessed with making hiring faster, but speed isn't the problem – intelligence is," declares Alisher Jafarov, founder and CEO of Avery, who has first-hand experience building and scaling commercial teams at multiple international companies.

“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."

The company targets ambitious organisations with 200-1000 employees in technology, professional services, and scaleups – companies where hiring mistakes can make or break growth trajectories.

"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. 

"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."

The platform's deep semantic understanding achieves near 100% hiring manager satisfaction by surfacing candidates that traditional tools would overlook.

Further, the semantic engine keeps learning – every click and successful hire makes the next match even more precise.

The funds were secured through Builders Startup Studio and will fuel Avery's expansion across Europe. The company has 25 customers across six countries.

Lead image: Avery founders, Alisher Jafarov and Marco Dubbeld. Photo: uncredited.