Melbourne-based recruitment platform Sapia.ai has closed a $17 million Series A funding round led by Macquarie Capital and W23.

Sapia.ai’s capital injection comes eight months after it raised $7 million in a funding round backed by global recruitment firm Hudson, Yarra Capital Management chair Dion Hershan, Melbourne investor Leigh Jasper and former Macquarie Corporate Advisers chair Jim Craig.

Founded in 2013, Sapia.ai offers an AI smart interviewer, facilitating a chat interview where candidates answer five questions in their own time via mobile or desktop. If successful, prospective employees are automatically progressed to a video interview in which they record responses to questions in a chat.

Originally called PredictiveHire, the company will use its latest funds to scale aggressively in the US, where currently 10 of its 50 enterprise customers are based. It also plans to make its platform available in multiple languages.

“We've effectively developed new science and homegrown innovation. We can understand people from language,” Sapia.ai founder and CEO Barb Hyman told Business News Australia. Also commenting “When there are no recruiters required, you're able to make offers within an hour or 24 hours. With Woolworths, they reduced time to hire by 10 days, which is really significant,”

Macquarie Capital Venture Capital business co-founder Dan Phillips said that his team was impressed and excited by the technology solution that Sapia.ai has created and how it is using AI to provide a better way for companies to approach and solve for diversity and inclusion.