Kiku raised €4M to fix the hiring problem

Frontline workers represent more than 80% of the global workforce. Hospitality. Logistics. Retail. Warehousing. Contact centres. These are not niche industries. They are the operational backbone of every economy, and the people who work in them have, for years, been subjected to a hiring process designed for someone else entirely.

The ATS was built for corporate recruitment. Structured applications, desktop-first candidates, multi-week pipelines, salaried roles with long notice periods. None of that maps to a hotel group hiring 200 seasonal workers, a logistics company backfilling a driver role overnight, or a staffing agency processing 486 applications for a single placement.

This is the gap that Eric André and Rasmus Andersen set out to close when they founded Kiku in 2024. Eric had lived the problem directly at Voi, scaling the business across six Nordic cities and hiring hundreds of frontline workers each year with tools that were never built for that purpose. The result is an AI-agent built for frontline hiring at scale.

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The structural mismatch nobody fixes

Frontline candidates are mobile-first. They apply between shifts, on their phones, often without a saved CV and rarely during office hours. They may be non-native speakers. They are applying to several roles simultaneously and will take the first reasonable offer that responds. A process that takes two weeks to return a response has already lost them.

On the recruiter side, the cost of manual screening at volume is not a workflow problem, it is a structural one. A hospitality group managing a seasonal push might receive 1,300 applications. A staffing agency recruiter might carry 15 open requisitions simultaneously. There is no version of manual first-stage screening that handles that load consistently, fairly, or at the speed the market requires.

The result is a feedback loop nobody wins. Businesses haemorrhage productivity while roles sit open. Recruiters spend the majority of their time on tasks that do not require their judgment. And candidates, who are also customers or potential advocates for the brand, are ghosted at the first interaction.

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"Scale and quality are no longer mutually exclusive. We leverage AI to prove that candidates can be treated fairly while companies drastically improve their ways of working." Eric André, Co-founder & CEO, Kiku

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What Kiku actually does

Kiku's AI agent, Sara, handles the step between application received and shortlist ready. Candidates apply via a conversational interface on their phone, any time of day or night, in any language. Sara runs a structured interview, asks the questions that matter for the specific role, and delivers a screened shortlist to the recruiter. Every applicant gets a response. Nobody is ghosted.

Crucially, Kiku is not a replacement for the ATS. It integrates with over 100 applicant tracking systems, including TeamTailor, Greenhouse, Workable, and RecMan, sitting inside the tools teams already use. Recruiters do not change their workflow. Kiku handles everything upstream.

On bias: Sara assesses every candidate on the same criteria, regardless of name, age, gender, or ethnicity. Removing unconscious bias from early-stage screening is not a feature Kiku bolted on. It is a design principle. For candidates, it means a fair first interaction with every company using Kiku. For employers, it means a more defensible and consistent process.

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Two years in: what the results show

Kiku raised a 4 million euro Seed round in 2025, led by Cherry Ventures with participation from Yellow and prominent angels including Fredrik Hjelm and Felipe Navio. It was a big moment for us and now we feel like it's the right time to show what it’s actually led to.

Because in the end, what matters isn’t the announcement, it’s the results. And those are now starting to speak for themselves. Here’s what three customers have seen in production.

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What comes next

Kiku is expanding across the UK, France, Germany, and Benelux, alongside its existing base in the Nordics and US. The platform now covers hospitality groups, retail chains, and staffing agencies, with continued investment in the integrations and compliance infrastructure that European enterprise customers require. The EU AI Act is a factor that matters here: Kiku is EU-native, with audit trail, human oversight, and data handling built accordingly from the start.

If you run recruitment for a hospitality group, retail chain, or staffing agency and your team is processing more volume than it has capacity to screen properly, the conversation is worth having.