HANDSHAKE

It began in a $700-per-month rental house in West Houghton, Michigan. Garrett Lord, Ben Christensen, and Scott Ringwelski were Michigan Tech students tired of watching talented classmates get ignored because they lacked elite connections.

They spent their early days crammed inside a used 2012 Ford Focus that had survived two rollover crashes. Lord and Christensen used it as a mobile office while cold-calling university career centers for months.

It was a brutal slog. Nothing worked until they finally signed five schools in Michigan and Indiana.

That tiny win proved the model, and suddenly sixty schools jumped on board. They were solving a real problem, and they did it with zero Silicon Valley pedigree.

Handshake built the definitive two-sided marketplace for early-career hiring. The platform gives students and alumni free access to job listings, events, and direct messaging with employers.

On the other side, companies pay to post roles, run hiring campaigns, and access candidate data from schools they never used to visit. It generates revenue through employer subscriptions and premium recruiting tools rather than charging students a dime.

The math works beautifully because once a university integrates Handshake, it becomes the official pipeline for graduation. Employers have no choice but to pay to access that concentrated talent pool.

The flagship product remains their core recruiting platform. It handles everything from campus job boards and virtual career fairs to direct employer messaging and analytics dashboards.

The platform is so deeply embedded in college career centers that it functions as the default operating system for early-career hiring. Handshake AI is their newer division.

It captures real student application and interview data, then packages it into training datasets for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. It essentially monetizes the recruiting friction itself by teaching AI how to actually evaluate human potential.

The original growth playbook relied on locking down university partnerships campus by campus. They focused heavily on state schools and non-elite colleges first, building a massive underdog user base before expanding to Ivy League universities.

But the real explosion happened in 2024 when they treated AI as an entirely new startup inside the company. They shifted gears from recruiting software to selling high-quality human training data to frontier AI labs.

That pivot took them from zero to $100 million in annual recurring revenue in under a year. They used a land-and-expand sales tactic, putting junior sales reps in direct contact with enterprise accounts to crack open multi-million dollar contracts.

It completely bypassed their own slow-and-steady recruiting growth.

They are staring down a brutal shift in the entry-level job market right now. A softer economy means companies are slashing early-career roles, which directly cuts into Handshake's core transaction volume.

At the same time, they are constantly fighting off LinkedIn and Symplicity, both of which have nearly unlimited resources and entrenched relationships. The company just cut 15% of its workforce to force a hard pivot toward its AI division.

That kind of internal surgery always carries execution risk, especially when the new business runs on a completely different sales cycle. They have to balance keeping universities happy with training AI models before their core recruiting revenue stalls out.

True Ventures led the seed round and stuck around for the follow-ons. Kleiner Perkins led the Series A in February 2016 and brought heavy tech credibility.

EQT Ventures, Spark Capital, GGV Capital, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Omidyar Network came in later. The big one was a $200 million Series F in January 2022, led by Coatue Management and the Valiant Peregrine Fund, which set the $3.5 billion valuation and more than doubled the previous year mark.

Roughly $435 million raised in total. Those early checks kept them alive through the years when nobody believed a recruiting app could beat traditional campus fairs.