Avery funding news – Rotterdam-based Avery Raises €300K in a Pre-Seed Funding

Avery focuses on organizations with 200-1000 employees in tech, professional services, and scale-ups, where hiring mistakes can greatly impact growth.

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

The hiring crisis is worse than people realize. Companies lose €50,000 for each bad hire, and high-growth firms have a 20% mis-hire rate. For a scale-up with 50 bad hires, that’s up to €500,000 lost. But the €200B recruitment industry still relies on ineffective solutions like keyword matching and applicant tracking systems.

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Marco Dubbeld, co-founder and CTO of Avery said, “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,”.

Jafarov said, “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,”.

Dubbeld said, “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,”.

About Avery

Avery, founded by Alisher Jafarov and Marco Dubbeld, is a hiring platform that helps companies find and develop the right talent using market data and smart guidance. The company aims to improve traditional hiring by offering real-time market insights, better job design, and smart talent matching.