• Employee disengagement leading to workforce inefficiency and lack of productivity costs the global economy $7.8 trillion every year, with significant friction points coming from a lack of understanding of employees and outdated, blanket practices for managing and developing talent.
• Koios is upgrading the personality and management insights market by significantly reducing cost and friction in the process, using voice instead of self-assessment to acquire these insights.
• Whilst traditional personality insights companies can charge up to £250 and take up to half an hour to complete, Koios starts at £3 per employee on a monthly subscription, and insights can be generated from as little as 90 seconds of active speech. 
• To ensure the inclusivity of all people, regardless of race, gender, or geographical origin, Koios acquires original training data. 
• Koios provides inclusive and enriched insights, designed to enable leaders and organisations to have a bespoke approach to managing and developing their talent based on their unique personality.
• Koios’ first institutional round is led by Seedcamp with support from Evolvient Capital and industry angels.

LONDON SEPT 5TH 00.01 BST: Koios, the voice-driven AI platform set to drastically reduce cost and friction in the personality and management insights market, empowering human understanding between employers and employees, today announced its Pre-Seed funding round led by Seedcamp, with additional support from Evolvient Capital and industry angels.

London, UK-based Koios is on a mission to fundamentally improve the way that organisations work with their talent. Leveraging its proprietary voice-driven AI algorithms, the platform provides low friction and cost-efficient personality insights, enabling managers and teams to work together more effectively in a matter of seconds.

Talent and HR teams run the Koios application, inviting existing employees to partake or sit over existing interview processes for candidates, with a minimum of 90 seconds of active speech required to provide a bespoke set of personality and management insights from a candidate or employee’s voice. These insights provide managers and organisations with bespoke ways to communicate, motivate and develop each employee, designed to enable anyone regardless of their background, to thrive.———

Koios was founded by Tom Sherwood and Alex Lewis in 2020, who had experienced the first hand pain of the lack of technology available to support managers and teams, as leaders themselves, before bringing in their third co-founder Martin Lukac.

Alex Lewis, COO comments:

“In our roles at Spotify and Seedcamp respectively, Tom and I had been helping companies across the Big Tech, start-up, and the scale-up world for years and one of the biggest buzzwords and blockers to hiring at the time was “culture fit”, which we despised as it had connotations of an individual having to “fit in” rather than a company enabling the success of each employee. As managers and leaders, we’d been through personality assessments over the years and we recognised that there were some useful insights in the more “robust” assessments, and questioned why there wasn’t greater adoption across the industry below leadership level (93% of the market wasn’t being served). After speaking with industry leaders, they made it clear that if friction from self-assessment could be removed and a more cost-effective model be put in place, then there was a great opportunity for mass adoption. 

The addition of Martin Lukac, as Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist, led Koios to a significant breakthrough in the ability to understand personality using voice. Under his technical leadership the company developed and applied state-of-the-art audio deep learning models using original data collection with an emphasis on a conscientious and ethical approach.

Lewis adds:

“Not only can we provide existing workforce analysis, we will be able to run Koios over the top of an interview process at the click of a button and provide insights from 90 seconds of active speech, without the need to change the process or for the candidate or employee to do anything other than consent, of course. We are very conscious to eliminate as much of the bias as possible in the algorithms, so we spend a lot of time manually gathering and curating our training data to ensure that our tool serves everyone, regardless of their demographic — be it gender, ethnic background, or accent — so we can provide fair and inclusive insights to be used to lead, manage and develop employees, categorically not to assess their suitability for a role.”

Especially in down markets like we see today, organisations are having to work more efficiently with leaner teams, so it has never been more important to invest in workforce development and optimisation. 

Carlos Espinal MBE, Managing Partner at Seedcamp adds,

“Koios brings much-needed innovation in the talent development industry, particularly in the tech sector. Having worked closely together with Alex in his previous role as Seedcamp’s Head of Talent, I’ve admired his dedication and passion for nurturing talent across our portfolio and empowering them to thrive., Designed as an enablement tool, the platform helps find a better fit between employers and employees, thus facilitating a successful and productive, long-term collaboration. We couldn’t be more excited to back such an exceptional team on their mission to enable employees to reach their full potential and leaders and organisations to develop their workforce effectively.”

This new funding is set to enable Koios to prepare to go-live in September and continue investing in inclusive training data and developing the platform. Talent leaders and organisations can get early access on the company’s website www.getkoios.ai   

Notes to editors: About Koios

Koios is a voice-driven AI platform on a mission to fundamentally improve the way that organisations work with their talent. Aiming to provide talent leaders and organisations with bespoke ways to communicate, motivate and develop each employee, the company is developing and applying state-of-the-art audio deep learning models using original data collection with an emphasis on a conscientious and ethical approach.

About Seedcamp

Seedcamp is Europe’s seed fund, identifying and investing early in world-class founders attacking large, global markets and solving real problems using technology. The Seedcamp Nation includes over 470 startups building breakout businesses that change the way people live, interact and buy and includes publicly listed UiPath, Wise, and unicorns Revolut, Sorare, Pleo, wefox, Grover, Synthesia, and viz.ai along with fast-growing businesses such as Primer, Peppy and Ezra. 

HOW KOIOS WORKS

Koios provides a platform that enables human understanding through personality and management insights, frictionless and cost-effective. Their AI enables organisations to understand their talent, purely from voice, meaning no self-assessment is needed from the candidate or employee. To ensure the inclusion of all people, regardless of race, gender, ability, or geographical origin, Koios is built on an ethical and inclusive data set.

Talent/Recruiting/HR teams run the Koios app over an existing interview process, which interacts with Zoom, Meet, Teams, etc., and begin understanding the candidate or employee, syncing back to the Koios platform in real-time so when you are finished, the insights are there.

These insights can then be used by managers to better understand their candidate or employee, provided with bespoke ways to ensure their success in their role. This is not a selection tool, it is an enablement tool.

FIND OUT MORE

How does Koios’s technology work?

Diversity & Inclusion statement

Koios Ethical AI Charter