Established in 2022, HireBrain aims to improve business success through enhanced hiring outcomes, by focusing on the human contribution at each stage in the hiring process.

HireBrain’s hiring enablement platform, powered by neuroscience and behavioral economics, uses context-aware AI to automate high-value, labor-intensive tasks and align execution with broader organizational talent and business strategies.

To date, the company has generated $1.5 million in funding and attracted a client base including Nokia, Nutanix and Ivanti.

HireBrain was announced as winner of the UNLEASH Startup Award at UNLEASH America 2025 in Las Vegas.

John Brazier: What does winning the UNLEASH Startup award mean for HireBrain?

David Nason: There are two key things. One is validation and the other one is the opportunity to amplify our brand.

There was no expectation on my part that we would be the winner, but for the judges and several esteemed folks and companies in our prospects to share with us that our focus area and what we’ve provided has a truly unique value in the marketplace – that’s hugely validating.

Master Burnett: The validation piece is especially keen given the composition of the judging panel.

The UNLEASH judging panel is different than some of the other judging panels that we’ve come before; the combination of investors, large company Talent Acquisition leaders, coming forward and articulating that the value they saw in HireBrain is something they not only understood, but could have leveraged in their organizations was really powerful.

JB: What is HireBrain’s USP? What makes your proposition special?

DN: It really starts with the fact that this is genuinely context aware, that it is powered and informed by neuroscience and behavioral economics.

It personalizes everything that needs to be created, even somebody’s experience, based on the unique user, based on the functional area within that company that somebody is a part of, as well as the entire enterprise.

What it can create for Wells Fargo is far different than what it would create, you know for Oracle, for example, and that gives us the ability to do a couple of things. Not only does that up-level every single stakeholder in the process, this is a full suite of applications for every stage in a hiring cycle, and beyond, to achieve business objectives and help individuals to connect to the work.

I think that’s a big thing that is missing generally in in a typical hiring cycle – what is the true value of this role?

MB: What’s truly fascinating is that ours is one of virtually a few solutions that can enable the coordination and activation at every level of hiring because of that contextual awareness.

If you look at our competitive landscape, it is dominated by point solutions that touch a tiny aspect of the process. It is nearly impossible for an organization to coordinate and drive transformation at a massive level when all the tools that are used to empower action are hyper fragmented.

That is probably our most dominant, our most powerful, unique selling proposition – our ability to drive that coordination at scale.

JB: How is HireBrain trying to change the world?

DN: Fundamentally we are committed to our strategy around AI, which is augmented not replacement. We believe that the power of these technologies, and the ability to utilize those, has the power for great good in the world if it is built and used to serve humans in one of the most important areas of our life – our work.

This is a platform that an organization, or a Head of TA, or Head of HR, can use to create an environment where people thrive at work, and we define thriving as performance, engagement and satisfaction. That trilogy, if you will, applies to the individual, it applies to the manager, the executives, the leadership, as well as the company.

By doing that we have the opportunity to bring good into the world, and we have the ability to transform the conversation.

Recruiting HR and many other functions are in a point of existential crisis. We can harness the power of AI and bots and use them to improve people’s lives.

MB: If you look at all the rally cries against organizational inefficiency, against the broken recruiting process, against the wretched experience of candidates and hiring managers, even recruiters in the role, it comes down to ineffective, foundational applications of labor that are profoundly broken.

As we have become laser focused on efficiency, we’ve cut out all of the work that makes things effective. One of the biggest things that we’ve cut out is being real about the work to be done and instead we started to get really aspirational, to create job descriptions that were more focused on the attributes of the people versus what had to get done.

We’re getting back to being real. Hiring is enabling organizations to get back to being effective at applying people to work in a way that isn’t focused on aspirational attributes. It’s focused on the work that needs to get done and finding the people who are really motivated, entrenched and capable of executing that work and putting them in those roles.

That’s how we impact things like job satisfaction, job performance and job engagement, because we’re focused on putting people in real jobs that are capable of doing the work that job requires at that point in time.

JB: What are the next strategic goals for HireBrain?

DN: Our number one goal is to expand the number of customers, thinking about how are we bringing this value in this story to more organizations and doing it in a way that truly supports them on their journey to transformation.

It’ll be interesting when we find a use case that our core technologies can’t support, because we’re finding new ones every single day. Intake technology was built to drive a great conversation between a manager and a recruiter, and guide them through that hiring cycle but we’re moving beyond that.

That technology, that same architecture, is now being used to create justifications for hire. We have companies who are interested in having that be part of performance conversations, because the analysis and plans it creates support multiple different use cases.

Our next big launch is the candidate evaluation suite. The entire suite will go live and include scheduling all the way to onboarding. So, we will have planning all the way through that onboarding experience.

MB: We’re really looking for those organizations that are at the forefront of transformation, that see and reinforce the value of people. We’re looking for those strategic customers that present the right circumstances to leverage that story, help be a part of the growth of HireBrain and drive that story.

That’s really where we’re at right now. Who are those foundational companies that are going to really put the bookends around the story and enable us to drive significant growth?

JB: What is your key message to HR leaders?

DN: Companies are in a moment right now and people are panicked; they’re looking for solutions and this is a platform to execute global strategy effectively, overnight and in the flow of work.

There’s unique value for a CHRO that we can execute a global strategy within this current, dynamic marketplace, in the flow of work.

Having the ability to do that in the flow is super engaging and it’s also, I would argue, the first platform to give to the business that helps them to do their job that they love.

The relationship between recruiting organizations, HR and the business is being transformed virtually overnight by giving them something of value. You fix the hiring manager. You fix the candidate experience, onboarding, early attrition, the recruiting experience, and the overall HR experience.

MB: I don’t think there is anything more pivotal to the success of a business than how it attracts and deploys people into accomplishing the work of the organization. It is an architectural role with profound impact.

I look at this period, which David characterizes as an existential crisis, and I think it is. I look at where we are today, at this existential crisis and the onslaught of AI technology coming at the recruiting profession…it is a massive freeway to mediocrity.

AI tools are profoundly effective at doing things at scale with great efficiency, but they do everything to the mean. That’s what AI technology does – it generates to the mean of its training data. If that data is mediocre in the first place, you’re really accelerating yourself to the average of mediocrity.

If you don’t, if you’re not out in front of how you are deploying technology and coordinating the application of effort across the various stages, that’s the real risk I see in front of us today. That we’re going to start to take piecemeal technology here and there, all of it with different sets of training data and minimal awareness of each other, and we are going to put ourselves on a massive freeway to mediocrity.