Back in 2020, when the pandemic forced schools and colleges online, Jayanth Neelakanta was focused on a very different problem: preventing students from cheating in remote examinations.
That product, AutoProctor, eventually became the foundation for Equip, an AI-led hiring platform now used by over 700 enterprises, including Wipro, LG, Treebo, Practo, MyGate, Shadowfax, and Cipla.
Founded in 2020, Equip is now positioning itself as what Jayanth calls the “Amazon for hiring.”
“If you want to purchase something, you go to Amazon, look for the item, and get a curated list depending on price range and reviews. In exactly the same way, if you want to hire for some role, it should be easy to go to Equip, mention what kind of role, experience and notice period you need, and we will surface the most relevant candidates for you,” the CEO tells AIM.
That vision is ambitious, especially for a company run by just five people.
The Pivot
Jayanth’s path into HRtech was anything but direct. A solo founder with a PhD in Physics from Syracuse University, he returned to India with a deep interest in education and began by building an e-learning SaaS platform serving European clients.
“One of our customers for that e-learning tool said they wanted some proctoring tools because the classes were going online. And that’s how AutoProctor started,” he recalls.
As classrooms reopened, however, another pattern began to emerge. Recruiters were using the same platform for assessments and hiring tests.
“When COVID-19 went away, and schools went back to in-person, we realised that a lot of recruiters were using us,” Jayanth remembers. “We saw that hiring is a large market, so we decided to launch Equip.”
Solving the Discovery Problem
Companies often use one tool for resume screening, another for coding tests, and separate systems for interviews and candidate tracking. Equip unifies it.
“What companies do right now either is they conduct AI interviews for recruiters, or they say if you have a bunch of resumes, they will tell you the most relevant resumes,” Jayanth says. “We are able to combine both those aspects.”
For each role, the Bengaluru-based startup, founded in 2022, maps a defined skill layer and domain expertise for industry roles. “Whatever is mentioned in the job description, the AI will parse it and find candidates that match those requirements,” he adds.
A major concern associated with AI hiring or AI video interviews is credibility. This is where Equip’s proctoring roots come in.
“One thing we do is conduct AI interviews for candidates,” Jayanth says. “Before we show them as a result, the AI bot interviews the candidate based on the skill.”
The platform tracks camera feeds in real time, detects whether the candidate steps out of frame, flags multiple people in view, and monitors screen-sharing sessions to identify the use of answer-prompting tools.
“If I step out of the camera feed, the machine learning knows there is no face being detected,” he explains. “If I ask multiple people to come help, the machine learning knows that there is someone assisting.”
The AI stack itself is multi-model. “We use OpenAI models, Anthropic, and Gemini,” Jayanth notes. “Gemini models are the most accurate for real-time conversation.”
Enterprise Proof Point: Wipro
Equip’s strongest public case study comes from Wipro. According to the company’s website, Wipro used Equip’s automated skill testing platform to process more than 500 candidates, reducing hiring effort by 97% and saving 28,800 hours.
“The fact that we are a small team does not mean that we do not have scale in terms of revenue,” Jayanth says, without disclosing the topline figures.
He attributes much of that efficiency to AI-led internal operations. “Without AI, we would need something like a 20-member team to be able to do all this,” he notes.
Funding and What Lies Ahead
Equip raised a $400,000 pre-seed round from Better Capital in 2022, after going through Y Combinator with AutoProctor in the 2021 batch.
Since then, “We have been profitable, so we have not had to raise again,” Jayanth says.
The company is now expanding into candidate engagement tools, including professional quizzes and game-like assessments inspired by LinkedIn-style interactions.
The startup says its USP lies in combining candidate sourcing with evidence-backed assessment.
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