Ashby Raised a $3.5M Seed, Kept the Team at Three, Then Grew Revenue 10x: Benjamin Encz's Story

October 5, 2026

TL;DR: Ashby is an all-in-one recruiting platform that combines an applicant tracking system (ATS) with reporting, interview scheduling and sourcing in one product. It was founded in 2018 by Benjamin (Benji) Encz and Abhik Pramanik and went through Y Combinator in early 2019. As Encz shared on the show, the company raised a seed round of about $3.5 million and kept the team at just three people while it built for roughly 18 months before its first paying customer in mid-2020. Revenue hit "hundreds of thousands" by the end of 2020 and "multiple millions" the year after, which he described as "more than 10x growth." Since then Ashby has raised a $21.5M Series B (September 2022), a $30M Series C (June 2024) and a $50M Series D (July 2025). Encz told the full story, including why Ashby had no real website until its Series B, on The Product Market Fit Show.

A note on the numbers in the episode title. The "three people" period was the build phase, from the 2019 seed round until shortly after the first customers arrived in 2020. The 10x jump came after that, in 2021, once Ashby had raised its Series A and started hiring. Encz did not give an exact ARR figure on the show; the "$2M ARR" in the title is the host's shorthand for his "multiple millions." All episode figures are from the time of the interview, which aired in July 2024.

What does Ashby do?

Ashby sells software that recruiting teams use to run their whole hiring process: job postings and the applicant tracking system, interview scheduling, candidate sourcing, and analytics on top of all of it. The pitch is that one product replaces several separate tools, without giving up any features those tools had.

That pitch came straight out of how the market looked in 2018. The leading ATS products, Encz explained, were built around 2012 and 2013. Recruiting teams changed how they worked around 2017 to 2019, and a wave of add-on tools appeared to fill the gaps: add-ons for reporting, for scheduling, for re-engaging past candidates. Ashby's bet was that a product built from scratch in 2018 should bring those pieces together.

The biggest gap was data. When Encz and his team interviewed recruiting leaders, one complaint came up again and again.

"So we started with like 10, 15 conversations or so before we committed to this, but in total we talked about a hundred some TA teams and reporting literally came up like 90 out of a hundred. And it was like the reason people were switching between applicant tracking systems." — Benjamin Encz, Ashby

Key stat: as he shared on the show, reporting came up in roughly 90 of 100+ conversations with talent acquisition teams, and almost all of those teams had switched ATS products within the previous three years.

That second point mattered too. An ATS is hard to replace, so if nearly everyone was switching anyway, the pain was real.

As of June 2024, TechCrunch reported Ashby had more than 1,300 customers, up from over 500 paying customers when it launched publicly in September 2022. As of July 2025, Crunchbase News reported more than 2,700 customers, including OpenAI, Ramp, Notion, Harvey, Cursor, Shopify and Snowflake, and ARR growth of 135% over the prior year.

Who founded Ashby?

Ashby was founded in 2018 by Benjamin Encz, who is CEO, and Abhik Pramanik (verified via an October 2026 web search of TechCrunch and Ashby's own announcements).

Encz's background is software engineering. Before Ashby he worked at PlanGrid, the construction software company later acquired by Autodesk. He joined as an iOS engineer and moved into engineering management as the company grew from about 100 people to 400 or 500. Once he became a manager, as he shared on the show, hiring took over his job: about 80 to 90% of his time went to recruiting engineers.

That is where he felt the problem first-hand: hundreds of hours a month on hiring, and no easy way to tell what worked. His team had a hunch that candidates from the sourcing platform Triplebyte rarely turned into hires. When they finally pulled the data, the offer acceptance rate for that channel was about 10%, because those candidates were getting competing offers from many other companies at once. It took three months of manual spreadsheet work to learn that.

He watched the space for about two years before committing. The founders quit their jobs around August 2018, did YC in early 2019, and closed the seed around March 2019.

How much has Ashby raised?

All rounds below are as of October 2026, verified via web search of the sources named.

Seed, 2019: about $3.5 million. The host gave this figure on the show and Encz agreed; the round closed around the end of YC.
Series A: about $10 million. As Encz shared on the show, an existing investor offered it when Ashby had roughly 20 paying customers.
Series B, September 2022: $21.5 million, led by F-Prime Capital with Elad Gil, Lachy Groom, Semper Virens, Base Case Capital and Gaingels, bringing the total to $34.5 million (TechCrunch and Ashby's launch release, September 2022).
Series C, June 2024: $30 million, led by Lachy Groom with Elad Gil, F-Prime and Y Combinator (TechCrunch, June 2024).
Series D, July 2025: $50 million, co-led by Alkeon Capital and Lachy Groom with F-Prime, Elad Gil and Gaingels (Crunchbase News, July 2025).

Key stat: Crunchbase News put Ashby's total funding at $142.5 million after the Series D, as of July 2025. Other trackers list slightly lower totals, so treat the overall figure as approximate.

As of October 2026, a web search found no round after the July 2025 Series D.

Why Ashby skipped the MVP and kept the team at three

The standard YC advice is to ship something small fast and iterate weekly. Encz decided that did not fit a product meant to replace a company's core hiring system.

"I don't think an MVP makes a ton of sense if you are replacing an existing system one to one." — Benjamin Encz, Ashby

Instead, the research was the MVP. The team ran two-part calls: the first half open-ended discovery, the second half walking through mock-ups of what Ashby would become. They sent prospects a landing page outlining the product and kept refining the mock-ups based on what they heard. Over time the feedback converged on one line.

"Like the main piece of feedback we got in the end was like, I don't know that you can actually build all of this, but if you can, that would be absolutely amazing." — Benjamin Encz, Ashby

At that point the market risk felt answered and what was left was building. That suited the founders.

"Like we're really good at building a great engineering organization. We want to figure something out that turns out to just be like a pure, pure execution problem." — Benjamin Encz, Ashby

The bundle only worked, he argued, because of the specific market. The point solutions in recruiting were mostly small vendors, so a single team reusing shared plumbing (notifications, permissions, the basic SaaS pieces) could match each one. Ashby's promise was full parity, not "all-in-one but you lose half your features."

"I think if you try to do it on sales, it's way harder because there are really big companies of like hundreds of engineers in each of the point solutions in sales. Whereas in recruiting, that's not the case." — Benjamin Encz, Ashby

Then came the counterintuitive call. With about $3.5 million in the bank, most founders would hire 10 or 15 people. Ashby stayed at three. The founders were financially conservative, there was not much work that could be done in parallel on a platform that had to be built in sequence, and every hour spent hiring was an hour not spent coding.

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"And there was like one that was immediately available. And then there were two or three others that were kind of passively working on, but it was like, we could spend time recruiting or we could spend time building. And we were just like, we're going to be really fast." — Benjamin Encz, Ashby

It took longer than planned: about 18 months instead of nine. In hindsight, he said, they could have gone to five people a few months later. Design partners signed letters of intent (a YC push) but paid nothing.

First customers and finding product-market fit

By mid-2020 the founders decided they had to prove the product worked. They narrowed the focus to making Ashby usable end to end for the smallest possible customer, early-stage startups, and Encz started cold outreach.

Key stat: as he shared on the show, he cold-emailed about 10 people and two or three became customers, including fast-growing startups. One was Deel, the remote payroll company, which he said grew from about 20 to about 3,000 people while using Ashby.

That created a growth loop. Ashby's job boards were branded, and Deel posted jobs constantly, so other startups kept seeing them and asking what this new tool was.

Pricing was deliberately low. As Encz shared on the show, a 20-person company paid around $200 a month, month to month, with no annual contract. The goal was simply to get someone to pay something.

Then 2020 hiring took off. Ashby went from its first paying customer in mid-2020 to "hundreds of thousands" in revenue by year-end, and to "multiple millions" the following year. Encz's own role flipped from engineering to running demos for a flood of inbound leads.

Key stat: as he shared on the show, Ashby grew revenue more than 10x in the year after its first full year of sales. He did not disclose the exact ARR.

Asked when he felt true product-market fit, Encz pointed to around the Series A, a few months after the first paying customers.

"I would see dozens of customers sign up every month with like the same kind of positive feedback and the same profile. And just felt like there's, there's something scalable here." — Benjamin Encz, Ashby

Retention was very high, he said; the first real churn came when startup customers failed in the venture downturn.

He also ran two quiet go-to-market motions at once. Startups used the full product and thought Ashby was "an ATS for startups." Larger companies kept their existing ATS and bought only Ashby's reporting on top, so they thought it was a reporting tool. With no public website beyond a wall of customer logos and a "request access" box, Ashby never had to reconcile the two stories until it was ready to launch publicly as a complete product, which it did in September 2022.

Key lessons from Benjamin Encz's playbook

1. If you are replacing a system of record, the MVP can be the research. Mock-ups, 100+ structured interviews and letters of intent de-risked demand before a line of production code shipped. 2. Look for markets where people already switch. A sticky product with constant switching means real, unsolved pain. Ask what makes buyers switch and what scares them about switching, then build around both. 3. Bundle only where you can match every point solution. Ashby's all-in-one bet worked because recruiting add-ons were built by small teams. In a market like sales tools, the same move would be much harder. 4. A small team can be a deliberate choice. Three people on a $3.5M seed meant less time recruiting, less coordination, and a long runway. The cost was speed, and Encz said he might have hired two more a bit sooner. 5. Build the company that fits you. Encz chose an existing market with no land grab so a conservative, execution-heavy team could win.

"Again, I think you build the kind of company that suits you personally, ideally." — Benjamin Encz, Ashby

For more founder stories on building lean and selling to HR and people teams, see Gusto's path from a $6M seed to $1B in revenue, Numeric's $28M Series A with a five-person team, and what product-market fit looks like in HR tech.

Listen to the full interview: YC founder raises $3.5M, keeps team to 3 people, then grows 10x.

FAQ: Ashby

Q: What is Ashby? A: Ashby is an all-in-one recruiting platform that combines an applicant tracking system with analytics, interview scheduling and sourcing. Its customers include OpenAI, Ramp, Notion, Shopify and Snowflake, as reported by Crunchbase News in July 2025.

Q: Who is the CEO of Ashby? A: Benjamin (Benji) Encz is the CEO and co-founder. He founded Ashby in 2018 with Abhik Pramanik, after working as an engineering manager at PlanGrid.

Q: How much funding has Ashby raised? A: Crunchbase News reported total funding of $142.5 million as of July 2025. Announced rounds include a $21.5M Series B (2022), a $30M Series C (2024) and a $50M Series D (2025). Encz said on the show the company also raised about $3.5M at seed and about $10M in its Series A.

Q: Who are Ashby's investors? A: Publicly named investors include Y Combinator, Lachy Groom, Elad Gil, F-Prime Capital, Alkeon Capital, Semper Virens, Base Case Capital and Gaingels.

Q: How fast did Ashby grow early on? A: As Encz shared on the show, Ashby got its first paying customer in mid-2020, reached "hundreds of thousands" in revenue by the end of 2020, and grew more than 10x to "multiple millions" the following year. He did not disclose an exact ARR figure.

Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story

Benjamin Encz, Founder and CEO of Ashby — built an all-in-one recruiting platform with a three-person team on a $3.5M seed, skipped the classic MVP, and grew revenue more than 10x once it launched.