Large organisations screen and place a high volume of candidates on a monthly basis. So far, the talent function scales linearly in accordance with a company’s talent requirement. It is an inefficient department, primarily because the high-value human resource spends a lot of time reviewing non-target candidates for vacancies.

Dr. Sam Dhesi experienced this problem when he was the Head of Emerging Technology for the UK government during the COVID-19 pandemic. The hiring requirement for his department was in the hundreds every month, which required the screening of thousands of candidates. Sam experienced the inefficiency of the process, and identified that the lowest-leverage and most time-consuming elements of the process could be automated.

Fascinated (and frustrated) by the process, he joined Lantum, a healthcare staffing consultancy, as a Strategic Advisor, where he met his cofounders, Ilyès and James. For different reasons, each of the co-founders had a strong desire to reform the way big businesses hired.

With the advent of LLMs, it was easy for the Popp team to iterate quickly and spin up a functional MVP. The team felt strongly that the product could function as a business per se, and set up the company, Popp, to house it. The tool proved valuable and popular, generating rapid commercial traction. The SuperSeed team met Popp at SuperSaaS, were impressed by their speed of execution, clarity of thought, founder-market fit, and enthusiasm for the problem.