Founded by serial entrepreneurs and current Virginia Tech Business + CS students Neal Shah and Avinash “Avi” Maheshwari, who have unique access in the hackathon and early career recruiting spaces.

They’ve teamed up again since their last venture FirstRound - personalized one-way AI interviews - was acquired by HireLogic. We’ll be following to see if they can build their recruiting industry relationships into meaningful traction.

Shah, who canceled his AWS internship to build Tala, won the Deloitte National Undergrad Case Competition and built a fintech tool that saved Fidelity $3M/year as an intern. Maheshwari joined him to take home first place at VTHacks and Best AI Startup at Startup Sprint.

Tala’s approach represents an interesting first step into the massive hiring market, which boasts impressive reported revenue growth from strtups such as Mercor and Turing.