AI platform Qureos raises $5mn seed round to fix hiring problems

Qureos, an AI-driven hiring platform founded in the Middle East, has closed a $5 million seed round led by Prosus Ventures and Salica Oryx Fund, with participation from Oraseya Capital, PlusVC, F6 Ventures, BDev Ventures, Sunny Side Venture Partners and Daniel Tyre, an early HubSpot executive who helped scale the company from inception to its IPO, and follow-on investment from COTU Ventures and Globivest.

According to a statement, the startup, founded by Alexander Epure and Usama Nini, will use the new funding to further develop Qureos’ AI capabilities, expand its go-to-market team, and accelerate geographic expansion through enterprise and agency partnerships.

Talking to Business Recorder, Co-Founder Usama Nini, who is originally from Pakistan, informed that while Qureos is headquartered in Dubai and operates across the Middle East, the company has built a meaningful operational presence in Pakistan as part of its global delivery model.

“Over the past few years, Qureos has invested in building and scaling its team in Pakistan, tapping into the country’s growing pool of technical and operational talent,” said Nini.

The co-founder believes that this distributed setup allows the company to operate efficiently at scale while serving enterprise and public sector clients across MENA and beyond.

“As Qureos expands into new markets, the Pakistan-based team remains an important part of the company’s operational engine, supporting rapid growth and platform performance,” he added.

The startup was built around a simple insight that hiring is not slow because of volume alone. “It is slow because it is fragmented,” says Qureos as recruiters juggle disconnected tools across sourcing, screening, and interviewing, while candidates move through the process with little clarity or feedback.

Whereas Qureos, an AI-driven hiring platform, treats hiring as a single system rather than a sequence of manual steps.

The startup says that its demand has surged as enterprises increasingly use the platform to run high-volume and time-sensitive hiring, compressing hiring timelines from months to as little as six days.

“Hiring at scale is one of the most operationally complex challenges facing modern organisations,” said Robin Voogd, Head of Middle East Investments at Prosus Ventures.

“Qureos has built a practical, end-to-end system that replaces fragmented recruitment workflows with a single, intelligent platform. By unifying sourcing, screening, and interviewing, the company enables employers to hire faster without sacrificing quality, a critical advantage in high-growth, time-sensitive markets.”

At the centre of that system is Iris, Qureos’ AI assistant that acts as the interface between companies and candidates throughout the hiring process. For employers and recruitment agencies, Iris functions as an AI recruiter assistant, automating sourcing, screening, and interviewing while continuously optimising for speed and quality.

On the candidate side, Iris matches individuals to relevant roles across the broader job market, allowing candidates to gain early visibility into aligned opportunities and receive role-specific feedback that helps them engage with the right opportunities from the outset.

On the employer side, Qureos automates the full recruitment workflow.

Hasan Haider, Founder and Managing Partner at Plus VC, said: “Qureos is solving a deeply operational problem with real, measurable impact. By dramatically reducing time-to-hire while improving recruiter productivity and candidate experience, the company is redefining how modern organisations approach talent acquisition.”

Hiring speed is becoming one of the most decisive competitive advantages for modern companies, said Alexander Epure, Co-Founder and CEO of Qureos.

“The organisations that win are the ones that can identify the right candidates and move decisively. We built Qureos to help employers and candidates meet in the middle, with a system that improves with every hire,” he said.