The Corporate Exit

Arya Marwaha was at BCG X, the digital arm of one of the world's top consulting firms. He'd already scaled 5 startups before turning 25. Aditya Sood was at NASA, working on NLP, and publishing research with Stanford's AI Lab and Anthropic.

Both were Stanford students. Both dropped out.

The target: the $500B recruiting industry, where agencies charge 20-30% of first-year salary for placing candidates using a process that hasn't fundamentally changed in decades.

What Contrario Actually Does

Contrario is the first fully autonomous AI recruiting agency. It finds candidates, screens them, reaches out, schedules interviews, and manages the pipeline - without a single human recruiter in the loop.

Not an "AI-powered tool for recruiters." A replacement for recruiting agencies themselves.

$2.5M
Seed Raised
W25
YC Batch
0
Human Recruiters

Why Recruiters Should Pay Attention

Recruiting agencies charge 20-30% of first-year salary. For a $150K hire, that's $30-45K per placement. The entire process is: search LinkedIn, send messages, schedule calls, coordinate. All of it is pattern-matchable by AI.

BCG strategist + NASA engineer + Stanford AI lab + Anthropic research. This founding team assembled the exact skills needed to build autonomous agents. Then they pointed them at recruiting.

The Breakout Pattern

Stanford dropouts with BCG and NASA on their resumes don't leave lightly. When they do, and they choose to build the same thing, the conviction is real.

That's the breakout.

Your domain expertise is the moat.

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