UNLEASH is proud to reveal the finalists for the prestigious UNLEASH Startup Award 2025 that will competing to take home the grand prize.

The best and the brightest HR startups have been competing behind the scenes – and today we are excited to announce our five finalists for this year’s competition at the International Festival of HR.

These five innovative startups will compete on-site on Day Two (May 7 at 11.30am on Stage 1)  in front of our panel of expert judges.

The winner will join an exclusive club of prestigious UNLEASH Startup alumni like Peakon (now part of Workday), Oneteam, Talent Alpha, Clustree, TandemHR, CandidateID, Talk’n’Job, and last year’s winner, Manifest.

The Finalists:

HANDOVER

Australia-based Handover was established in 2023, with the aim of eradicating talent experience loss as a result of poor transitions, whether through employee exits, restructures, or M&A.

As organizations face constant change — from resignations to internal moves — the ability to retain context, relationships and know-how is key to resilience and continuity. The 2022–23 tech downturn and resulting mass layoffs exposed broken handovers — often relying on last-minute documents, rushed calls, or nothing at all.

HandoverAI is a platform that uses AI, video, and smart prompts to guide employees through seamless knowledge capture. It integrates with work tools, extracts key insights, and creates a searchable, reusable record that supports onboarding, internal moves, and exits.

Where most solutions focus on static documentation or reactive offboarding, Handover is designed for ongoing knowledge continuity — supporting onboarding, internal mobility, parental leave, contractor transitions, and more.

HIREBRAIN

US-based Hirebrain combines neuroscientific principles with proprietary, context-aware generative AI, aimed at improving Quality of Hire (QoH) and reducing time spent on hiring cycles.

HireBrain is a pioneering hiring enablement platform that empowers talent acquisition teams and hiring managers to deliver exceptional hiring experiences—driving business success through improved hiring outcomes.

The platform focuses on upleveling the human contribution at each stage in the hiring process while using context-aware AI to automate high-value, labor-intensive tasks and align execution with broader organizational talent and business strategies.

It pairs native-AI applications and AI-assistants at each stage in the process, from role planning through candidate selection and onboarding, with an adaptive workflow engine that lets HireBrain deliver an organization’s ideal hiring workflow and experience.

KINFOLK

UK-based Kinfolk aims to scale execution across HR operations: Coordinating workflows, completing tasks, and guiding people in the flow of work through its platform, Kin.

HR is being asked to do more with less. Expectations are higher. Everyone wants operational efficiency—but workflows haven’t kept up. The problem isn’t system availability, process immaturity or missing knowledge. It’s fragmentation, friction, and a growing execution gap—costing companies time, trust, and talent

Kin is an AI HR Coordinator, giving every employee 24/7 access to accurate, personalized support inside Slack, Teams, email, and SMS, and helps run the day-to-day.

It handles 70% of requests before they reach the helpdesk, answering questions on policies, payroll, PTO, and benefits, and runs processes: Updating HRIS records (e.g. when employee details change), coordinating multi-step approvals, generating documents (like employment verification letters), managing system access—all with oversight.

TRUA

US-based Trua is defining the future of digital identity and trust screening with an industry-first, reusable, verified digital identity solution. Its patented, privacy-first technology delivers frictionless, all-in-one ID proofing and background screening—empowering businesses to verify and onboard candidates without directly soliciting personal information.

The HR industry is at a breaking point—traditional background checks are slow, invasive, and outdated, and repeatedly expose personal information. HR teams need a faster, smarter solution built for the future of work.

Traditional screening processes create major hiring bottlenecks, with turnaround times averaging 2 to 5 business days, but can extend to weeks due to various factors

The Trua platform is designed for the modern workforce. It eliminates traditional bottlenecks in hiring and onboarding by enabling instant verification, comprehensive risk assessments, and ongoing monitoring—all while preserving user privacy.

VIZZY

UK-based Vizzy has developed a platform for extraordinary, diverse talent to finally feel ‘seen’ during the crowded recruitment process, by allowing candidates to build a personalized digital profile in place of CVs, which reflect their potential, interests and ambitions, especially younger workers.

Businesses are drowning in large application volumes and struggling to spot top, diverse talent by looking at the same insights again and again – making a very exciting and talented generation sound ‘samey’. And it’s getting harder to spot great talent thanks to AI generated CVs and covering letters.

Candidate profiles created using Vizzy are unique in the market. Its solution comprises a collection of features – frontend and backend – such as an optional in-built psychometric assessment, CV upload, multimedia, skills, projects, interests, role bespoke Q&As (set by businesses), anonymized hiring, live data dashboards, a scoring system, and bespoke candidate landing pages.

The Grand Prize:

Entering the UNLEASH Startup Award offers the best and brightest of the HR tech landscape unrivalled access to the top HR analysts, thought leaders and investors. Past judges include Josh Bersin, Katarina Berg, Mike Ettling and Sarah White.

But the lucky winner will scoop a $50,000 sponsorship package for a future UNLEASH event – but please note, this figure does not include the price of the stand build and design.

The best of luck to all the finalists and we look forward to seeing you at UNLEASH America, May 6-8 in Las Vegas.

Want more information?

For more tips and insights, join the UNLEASH Startup community here.

And for more information on our Startup packages, which provide marketing opportunities to showcase your achievements, please contact:

Kennedy Cook, Startup & Investor Program Lead – at Kennedy@unleash.ai

Aniko Illes, Startup Business Development Manager – at Aniko@unleash.ai or on 00 36 20 255 87 41.