May 2025 – Unleash America Start-Up Competition: The Big Winner Is…
Happy Friday, Job Board Doctor friends! I was so happy to see some of your beautiful faces at Unleash America this week. The weather was pretty lame, but the start-up competition and the expo hall were plenty hot enough.
Let’s dive into my conference hot takes!
The Expo Hall is Back
The primary thing I heard and saw this week: the expo hall was hopping. Unleash always does an above-average job of getting the attendees into the expo hall at both their America and World shows. However, this year was different—it was busy. It’s probably one of the first times in a post-pandemic conference world I feel like I can truly say the expo hall felt back to normal. The energy was great on Day 1 and Day 2.
Deel Reads Auras and Ignores the Elephant in the Room
I didn’t hit many sessions as I spent my time roaming around the expo hall. All the usual players were there, with the funniest part being the GIANT Deel booth as soon as you walked into the hall. Deel’s activation? An aura reading. So many takes to be had there, but we’ll let the espionage take a breather this week.
Start-Up Action
Start-up Village
Sure, I’m biased, but I have to say that the Start-Up Eco-System at Unleash is by far the best of any of the conferences we attend—especially in the last three years. <3
If you haven’t been to Unleash in the last few years, they now offer “start-up tours” through the Start-Up Village as a perk to practitioners, investors, and the start-ups themselves. In the span of an hour, ten of us were able to hear 2-minute pitches from 10+ founders, ask questions as a group, and engage with start-ups we might have otherwise missed.
There were a lot of new start-ups and several more tenured start-ups taking a low and slow approach. I got a lot of energy from the tour and found several start-ups I am definitely interested in following up with. Vendors and investors alike are missing out if they’re not getting into the Unleash start-up tours and the start-up competition.
Start-Up Competition
A Day 1 highlight of Unleash is always the Start-Up Competition. This year, the 13th year of the competition, was no different.
The final five start-ups are invited to give their five-minute pitch, and then a series of judges get lob rapid-fire questions. Judges this year included Chris Hoyt, Benjamin Visser, Kathi Enderes, Kelly Cartwright, and Jim Holzer.
The hour started with co-host Jess Von Bank sharing her experience as a start-up contestant back in 2018. Jess, as always, was a fantastic emcee and set the tone for why participation in these competitions is important for start-ups of all types, funding stages, and maturity levels. She was joined by Jason Averbrook as co-host and I would dub them the forever hosts, if I had a vote.
The Competitors
In 2024, as I sat in the audience, there was absolutely no question who the winner was going to be. This year, the finalists felt more well-rounded with diverse solution offerings and maturity levels.
Kinfolk
Kinfolk is a U.K.-based agentic AI solution founded just 18 months ago. Kinfolk’s agent, Kin, boasts 100+ integrations that can be embedded across systems. The solution includes triggers for sensitive topics, recognizing when the AI agent should not engage in action and a human should intervene.
They are headed into their seed round and have secured U.K.-based accounts with plans to move into the U.S. Monetization is a per user, per month model with a commitment to cap the pricing of the agent at no higher than the annual salary required for a human to complete the tasks the AI agent is said to be able to complete.
Vizzy
Vizzy is a 2023 U.K.-based start-up boasting some of the most sought-after brands in the world, including Tiffany’s and Louis Vuitton. Vizzy is led by a dynamic wife-husband-brother team.
A user described Vizzy as a resume meeting Pinterest. The platform allows jobseekers to showcase their skills, talents, and personalities in a unique way. The start-up is focused on early careers to start and has higher levels of engagement from Gen Z, who are seeking a less traditional way to introduce themselves to prospective employers.
There are certainly opportunities for non–Gen Z users as LinkedIn gets more stagnant and Indeed offers no opportunities for innovative profile enhancement. Vizzy has raised $4.8MM USD. The solution felt fresh, and the founders didn’t use the word AI one time—which was incredibly refreshing.
HireBrain
HireBrain is a U.S.-based hiring enablement platform. The tool takes job duties, skills, education, and requirements as written by employees and/or hiring managers. The solution then writes the job descriptions, psuh the advert, and source candidates through Indeed and at least one other job board.
It also evaluates interviewers’ questions and candidate responses using “behavioral science”—which, as you all know by now, I am highly skeptical of due to their lack of accessibility and failure of validation for non-traditional jobseekers. The monetization is an annual flat rate with a predetermined number of credits based on expected hires, with more credits available for purchase in the annual contract period.
I will be honest, the presentation for HireBrain was the least impressive of all the start-ups. However, I spoke to several analysts and practitioners who had a drive behind the scenes, and they all praised the tool.
Handover
Handover is an Australian-based employee duty transition solution, which I loved. This is a tool I could have used regularly for my team at Disability Solutions. The company is currently in beta, having started around 18 months ago, and has raised pre-seed funding of $1MM AUD.
The presentation focused on an employee transitioning out of an organization. However, to me, the opportunity seems much larger for organizations of all sizes. If used well, it should offer a better understanding of key duties and responsibilities, write better job descriptions, identify job responsibility creep, and create more engaging transitions of duties due to promotion, work redistribution, or to support employees on extended leave—such as FMLA or parental leaves.
The HRIS integration can be used to trigger different workflows based on pre-identified employee status codes.
Trua
Trua—a U.S.-based start-up—is a decentralized background screening tool. The tool allows the applicant an opportunity to review and verify (but not change) their background report information prior to the results being sent to the hiring company.
The current model is B2B, with employers paying the freight for the background check—which I agree with philosophically, as a jobseeker should not be required to pay for pre-employment screens. However, there is a B2C opportunity with the applicant owning their own data and having access to potential data being returned based on their identity information.
Certainly, I see an opportunity here for job boards to partner with Trua to provide an additional tool for their community to apply more confidently and faster for their next gig. Not to mention add some extra transactional revenue to the bottom line.
And the winner is… HireBrain!
The team received a lot of publicity and a check from Unleash founder and CEO, Marc Coleman, for $50K!
🚨Reality Check
This week, my question for the group – Are you attending the right conferences? We have so many valuable conferences in our job board world—TA Tech, RecBuzz, and Job Boards Connect—and I encourage you all to attend, learn, and make partnerships at these stalwarts of our industry.
I want to push you to think about what additional conferences in our space might also serve your company’s needs—whether it’s for clients, partners, or just finding the most innovative tech to drive your solution, wherever you sit in the funnel, to the next level.
Where have you all found value in conferences? Which are your top priorities? Let me know!
Til Next Week,
The Doc
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