Local AI-powered staffing software startup CereHive brings in first outside investor

CereHive co-founders Matt Taylert (left) and Glenn Diersen. (Courtesy CereHive)

Since founding his IT staffing firm Summit Human Capital in Richmond in 2018, Glenn Diersen has taken great pride in the fact that the company has been self-funded throughout its seven-year journey.

Diersen intended to do things the same way upon launching his newest venture, AI-powered staffing software company CereHive, last year.

But it turns out running and funding a tech company is a bit of a heavier lift.

“Summit was a bootstrap firm through and through. I prefer to be a bootstrap founder but building a software firm as opposed to services … it’s quite interesting to see how much more expensive it is,” said Diersen. “It’s just incredibly capital intensive.”

After putting $250,000 into CereHive to this point, Diersen decided to take the leap to find some outside capital and earlier this month struck a deal to take on $500,000 from an undisclosed Virginia investor.

The money, which Diersen said is structured as debt with the potential to convert to equity, will give the 10-person company more room to run as it continues to hone its software and pitch the product to potential clients.

“That’s going to provide a huge runway,” Diersen said of the capital raise. “A company needs a legitimate runway to have an opportunity to talk to enough customers. We didn’t feel we were giving CereHive enough runway without a strategic partner.”

CereHive aims to help companies of all sorts in streamlining their hiring process and eliminating what Diersen calls “mis-hiring.”

The CereHive name is a combination of cerebellum and hive, to evoke a “a community of intelligence.”

It’s built to use AI to sift through piles of job applications and suggest the top 10% that matches a company’s parameters. Diersen calls it “talent discovery software,” for which he said CereHive has a patent pending.

CereHive does not require companies to buy new recruitment infrastructure, rather its software taps into a company’s existing hiring systems.

Diersen is CereHive’s CEO and co-founder along with business partner Matt Taylert, while remaining in his role as president at Summit Human Capital. CereHive is a standalone company and not part of Summit, although the new company operates out of Summit’s headquarters at 1635 W. Broad St.

Since taking the full product to market earlier this year, Diersen said CereHive is still technically in the “pre-revenue” phase but that he expects that to change any day now. Among its early customers is, naturally, Summit, plus others that are considering moving from “beta customers” to paying customers. He said he expects CereHive to have multiple paying customers within the next 90 days.

“It’s in the hands of prospects,” Diersen said. “We went to market before our product was perfect, because ‘done is better than perfect.’ We need to have all the time necessary to get in front of enough people to spread the word.”

Diersen said the new investor funds will pad the company for around two years and allow for more software development man-hours, and will likely be invested in business development, marketing and even AI tools to help power CereHive’s AI tools.

While CereHive continues on its path, Summit Human Capital has also hit some recent milestones.

Diersen said the company’s federal government staffing practice has reached a level of volume to warrant its own separate affiliate brand, SHC Federal.

The company also recently earned the ability to be a federal contractor offering IT professional services to the Department of Defense through the National Industrial Security Program, whereas it previously was limited to contracts for federal civilian government work.

Summit has nearly 300 employees. It has grown at a brisk clip in recent years, repeatedly landing on the RVA 25 list of the region’s fastest-growing companies, as well as the Inc. 5000, which recognizes the fastest-growing firms in the country.

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