Riya at Unicorn Factory Lisboa
312 candidates screened, 84 shortlisted, 31 interviewed. The first month of an AI recruiter on the job.
The setup
Unicorn Factory Lisboa runs an accelerator with a constant inflow of founder applications and a small ops team. Before Riya, screening a cohort meant two recruiters on call for three weeks. After Riya, it meant one person reviewing her shortlist on Friday afternoons.
We gave her a single brief: the ICP, the disqualifiers, and the three questions every founder had to answer. She built the rest of the workflow herself.
The numbers
Month one: 312 applications screened, 84 shortlisted, 31 interviewed live in Portuguese, Spanish, or English. Average call length was eleven minutes. Cost per qualified lead dropped from €38 to €4.20.
More important than the cost: every founder got a call within 48 hours. The team had been quietly losing the strongest applicants to faster programs. That stopped in week two.
What Riya is bad at
She doesn't read a room. When a founder gets emotional about a co-founder split, she stays on the script. The ops lead now picks those calls up halfway through, which is the right division of labor anyway.
We're not trying to make her a human. We're trying to make her a reliable first round so the humans can spend their hours on the conversations that need them.