Cedar
Cedar is in a16z speedrun SR006. Based in San Francisco, California, United States of America. Team of 4, founded in 2025.
Facts
- San Francisco, California, United States of America
- 4
- 2025
About Cedar
Summary
Cedar is a San Francisco-based startup, founded in 2025, building an AI-native professional network with a focus on recruiting. The core insight behind the product is that the strongest candidates rarely apply through job postings — they are typically reached through trusted referrals. However, referral programs tend to break down as organizations grow, not because employees lose their networks, but because manually activating those relationships at scale becomes unmanageable. Cedar addresses this by deploying AI agents that conduct short structured calls with employees to map their trusted professional relationships, surface relevant candidates, and continuously enrich a proprietary talent graph. The network effect compounds over time: each new customer and each additional call makes the underlying graph more valuable. Cedar appears to position itself as an invitation-only, high-signal alternative to incumbent professional networks, serving companies that prioritize quality of hire over volume of applicants. The company was co-founded by Greg Gunn and Beier Cai, who previously scaled Hootsuite from a small team to over 1,500 employees and from zero to $100M ARR, giving them firsthand experience with both the power and the fragility of referral-based hiring at scale.
Business model
Cedar appears to operate on a B2B subscription or contracted revenue model, selling access to its AI-agent-driven referral and talent-mapping platform directly to employers. The pricing angle likely reflects the high value of a quality hire relative to traditional recruiting costs, positioning the product as a premium alternative to both agency fees and large internal sourcing teams.
Go-to-market
Cedar's primary customers appear to be fast-scaling technology companies that have already exhausted conventional recruiting channels and recognize the compounding value of referral networks. The buying motion likely runs through heads of talent acquisition or founding teams who have direct budget authority and feel the pain of referral program degradation acutely. Early customer acquisition appears to have been driven largely through the founders' existing professional relationships, given the company closed approximately $3 million in revenue while still operating in stealth.
Founders (2)
- Beier Cai
- Greg Gunn
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