Hiring has always been a people-driven process, but the work surrounding it scheduling interviews, screening candidates, coordinating feedback, and managing assessments has often remained manual and fragmented. InCruiter, co-founded by Anil Agarwal and CA Ritu Mathran, is working to change this by combining human interview expertise with AI, data analytics, and automation.
Today, the company has worked with more than 600 clients, built a network of over 4,500 interviewers, and facilitated more than 15 million interview minutes. Its broader vision is to create an intelligent operating layer for recruitment—one that connects the entire hiring workflow, from sourcing to onboarding, while retaining human judgement where it matters most.
From Aerospace to Recruitment Technology
Anil Agarwal’s path into recruitment technology began outside the hiring industry. With a background in aerospace and product development, he was working with an e-commerce platform when the idea for InCruiter emerged through personal experience. Co-founder Ritu Mathran had attended an interview and experienced first-hand how difficult it could be to find the right interviewer and ensure a candidate was evaluated properly. Around the same time, Anil was considering building a startup. “When we started discussing the problem, we realised companies were spending a lot of time coordinating interviews and finding the right people to evaluate candidates.” The founders saw an opportunity to bring experienced interviewers into the hiring process and make technical and functional assessments more reliable, structured, and accessible.
What began as a solution to a practical interview problem gradually evolved into a larger ambition: improving the entire recruitment process.
The Meaning Behind InCruiter
The name InCruiter combines two words central to the company’s original idea: interviewer and recruiter. The founders wanted a name that would immediately connect with the recruitment industry while remaining distinctive enough to build a technology brand around.
“At the beginning, the idea was very simple: bring interview expertise into the recruitment process.” Although the company’s technology has evolved significantly since its launch in 2018, the name continues to reflect its foundational focus on improving the quality and reliability of interviews.
Surviving an Unexpected Turning Point
InCruiter launched as a pre-COVID product, at a time when most companies still relied on in-person interviews. The pandemic initially created serious challenges for the business.
Companies paused hiring, demand for the product fell, and InCruiter came close to bankruptcy. “It was an extremely challenging period for us.” As the pandemic continued, however, organisations became more comfortable with remote work, virtual collaboration, and eventually virtual interviews. Demand for InCruiter’s platform began to rise. What initially appeared to be a setback became a turning point. The company continued improving its product and adapting to the changing needs of hiring teams. “Entrepreneurship is not about having a smooth journey. There will be situations that are completely outside your control. What matters is how you respond to them.” The experience reinforced the importance of grit, adaptability, and building for where the market is heading rather than only where it stands today.
Building Credibility Through Human Expertise
InCruiter’s credibility has been built through years of conducting interviews rather than launching an AI product and asking customers to trust it immediately. The company has conducted interviews across more than 250+ technologies and both technical and non-technical roles. It has facilitated more than 15 million interview minutes and built a network of more than 4,500 interviewers. “That human expertise became the foundation for everything we built later.” When AI interviewing became more prominent, InCruiter used the knowledge gained from thousands of real interviews to develop its AI capabilities. The company’s AI product is therefore built on practical experience rather than designed in isolation. Enterprise clients also place significant importance on data privacy, security, and compliance. InCruiter has built its systems around these requirements, helping it meet the procurement and security expectations of large organisations. “We believe in using AI to improve speed, consistency, and scalability while keeping human expertise and oversight where it adds value.”
AI and Human Judgement
InCruiter does not view AI and human expertise as opposing forces. Instead, it treats them as complementary components of a modern hiring process. Traditional recruitment involves repetitive work: screening candidates, asking standard questions, scheduling interviews, collecting feedback, and evaluating large volumes of applicants. AI can handle many of these structured tasks consistently and at scale. However, hiring decisions involve nuances that cannot always be reduced to a score. Communication style, motivation, role fit, and context all matter. “Our vision is not to remove humans from hiring. It is to remove the repetitive work that prevents humans from spending their time where their judgement matters most.” InCruiter’s approach is shaped by its experience with human interviews. The company is bringing years of interview data, interviewer expertise, and an understanding of real hiring workflows into its technology.
A Gradual, Customer-Led Growth Model
InCruiter began with an initial investment of approximately ₹20–25 lakh. The founders did not invest the full amount at once. Instead, they deployed smaller amounts as the business evolved and as they understood where capital was required. Early spending focused heavily on marketing, awareness, and customer acquisition. This phase produced losses, but it helped the company understand the market and acquire its first customers. Once traction began to build, InCruiter reinvested in product development, team expansion, and features based on customer feedback. “Our approach was very gradual. We invested small amounts, learned from the market, acquired customers, and then reinvested into the business.”
This step-by-step approach helped the company build a customer base while strengthening its product over time.
Why Debt Over Equity?
InCruiter has raised more than $254,000 through debt financing. Anil says the decision was influenced by the company’s profitability. The founders did not want to dilute ownership at a valuation that did not reflect the business’s fundamentals. While some investors evaluated InCruiter through the lens of a traditional venture-backed technology company, the business was already operating profitably. “Why dilute ownership if we can access capital without giving away a meaningful part of the company?”
Debt provided flexibility. It allowed InCruiter to raise capital for growth while retaining ownership and control. The capital has supported the company’s expansion while maintaining the financial discipline that has been central to its operations.
Building Six Products Around Hiring Friction
InCruiter has built six products within its ecosystem. Its product roadmap is driven by a combination of customer feedback, problems observed by its own teams, and developments in recruitment technology. The company begins by identifying where recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates experience friction. Sometimes customers describe a problem directly. Sometimes internal teams identify a repetitive process that can be automated. Sometimes a broader technology shift, such as conversational AI, creates an opportunity to solve an existing problem differently. InCruiter’s product ecosystem now extends beyond interview delivery into:
- Incbot: AI interviewer
- IncServe: Interview as a ServiceIncScreen: AI Phone Recruiter
- IncFeed:Interview scheduling Software.
- IncVid: Live Interview Platform
- IncProctor: Proctoring as a Service
“The technology may change quickly, but the question we keep coming back to is simple: does this solve a real hiring problem?”
The Challenges of AI in Hiring
Anil believes AI presents an enormous opportunity for recruitment, but it also comes with significant responsibility. AI can make hiring faster and more scalable by automating resume screening, initial conversations, interview coordination, and candidate follow-ups. However, trust remains the biggest challenge. When AI is used to evaluate candidates, companies must consider accuracy, bias, explainability, data privacy, security, and whether the assessment is genuinely measuring the skills required for the role. The rise of generative AI adds another layer of complexity. Candidates may use AI tools themselves, making it more important for companies to assess whether a candidate actually possesses the skills being evaluated. “The companies that succeed in AI recruitment will not necessarily be the ones that automate the most. They will be the ones that build the most trustworthy systems.”
InCruiter’s advantage, according to Anil, comes from having spent years conducting human interviews before bringing AI into the process. The company’s approach is to combine automation with structured evaluation and human oversight.
From Interview Platform to Recruitment Operating System
InCruiter’s long-term vision is to build something similar to an n8n automation platform but for the recruitment industry. Today, companies often use separate tools for sourcing, screening, interviewing, scheduling, assessment, and onboarding. These systems may work independently, forcing recruiters to manually move information between stages. InCruiter wants to connect these stages through a network of intelligent agents that can share context across the hiring workflow. “Imagine a company starts with a job description. From that point, intelligent agents can work together across the recruitment process sourcing candidates, screening them, conducting assessments and interviews, coordinating next steps, and eventually helping move candidates toward onboarding.” The company also wants to address the period between offer acceptance and joining. A candidate accepting an offer does not necessarily mean the hiring process is complete. Companies must continue engaging candidates so they remain informed and connected until they join. “If we can make that happen, InCruiter won’t just be an interview platform. It can become the intelligent operating layer for the entire recruitment lifecycle.”
Automating Workflow, Preserving Judgement
For Anil and Ritu, InCruiter’s mission is to make hiring faster, more consistent, and more reliable without removing the human element from critical decisions. The company’s growth has been shaped by its ability to adapt during difficult periods, build trust through real interview experience, and develop products around genuine recruitment problems. As AI continues to reshape recruitment, InCruiter is positioning itself as a platform that automates the hiring workflow from sourcing to onboarding while ensuring that human judgement remains present where it is genuinely needed.
Interview By: Sejal Thakur
