Asendia AI × YC

Asendia AI is an agentic recruiting platform that turns a staffing agency's top recruiters into AI agents capable of sourcing, screening, and submitting candidates at scale. Its flagship agent, Sarah, conducts live phone and video interviews, reaches candidates across SMS and WhatsApp, evaluates fit against a job spec, and hands back a scored shortlist instead of a stack of resumes. The company is already live with staffing agencies across the US and Europe, running automated screens across healthcare, IT, and blue-collar verticals. The launch matters because high-volume recruiting teams are drowning in manual outreach while candidate response windows keep shrinking. Asendia plugs directly into existing hiring stacks, with integrations announced for Ashby and Workable , so recruiters can keep their ATS of record while offloading first-round calls, follow-ups, and scheduling to an agent that runs 24/7. The pitch to staffing firms and enterprise talent teams is straightforward: clone the playbook of your best recruiter, then point it at every open req. Asendia AI was founded in 2024 by Rihab Lajmi and Badis Zormati and is based in San Francisco. Lajmi, the CEO, previously worked as a cloud engineer at Microsoft and Google across Europe and the US. The pair are backed by Y Combinator and have said they are the first Tunisian founders to join the program, with Lajmi the first Tunisian woman accepted.