Federico Pedron has a theory about why most recruiting software fails in the real world. It's not the algorithms. It's not the screening questions. It's that nobody actually wants to fill out another form.
His solution? Meet candidates where they already spend hours each day: WhatsApp.
Klaaryo, the Milan-based startup Pedron leads as CEO, just closed a seed round north of €2.1 million to scale what might be described as recruiting infrastructure for the age of perpetual staffing shortages. The Techshop led the funding, joined by Frontech Accelerator—the frontier-tech arm of CDP Venture Capital—along with a collection of angel investors that includes Ottavio Maria Campigli from W Executive, the founding team behind Hlpy, and Paolo Fois, who runs Lexroom.
The pitch is deceptively simple. Instead of forcing hourly workers to navigate clunky applicant tracking systems or check email (who checks email anymore?), Klaaryo handles everything through WhatsApp: pre-screening chats, interview scheduling, reminders, even onboarding paperwork. An AI agent does the heavy lifting, fielding questions at 3 a.m. if necessary and nudging candidates through each step without requiring a human recruiter to babysit the process.
It's the sort of unsexy infrastructure play that doesn't generate headlines but solves a very real problem for a specific category of employer. Think quick-service restaurants, hotel chains, retail operations, logistics hubs—any business where hiring velocity essentially equals operational capacity. Mess up your hiring pipeline, and you can't staff Saturday's dinner rush.
Klaaryo claims it has already processed over 300,000 applications across 2,000-plus locations throughout Europe. The client roster reads like a directory of brands perpetually hunting for frontline workers: Burger King, Big Mamma Group, La Piadineria, Happy Casa, Germany's Nordsee.
Why WhatsApp?
The premise hinges on behavior, not just convenience. People in high-turnover roles—baristas, delivery drivers, hotel housekeepers—are far more likely to respond to a WhatsApp message than an email buried in a Gmail tab they rarely open. Klaaryo says its response rates hit 90 percent in some cases, with interview no-shows dropping by 75 percent and the likelihood of actually making a hire improving by 40 percent.
Those numbers matter when you're managing hundreds of hires per quarter across scattered locations. The platform works as either standalone SaaS or an API that plugs into existing HR systems, with pricing tied to candidate volume. Klaaryo even handles the WhatsApp Business Platform setup—phone numbers, verification, the bureaucratic minutiae that larger organizations would rather outsource.
Pedron and his co-founders—COO Luca Tamborino Frisari and CTO Luigi Adornetto—come to this challenge with some scar tissue. The trio previously ran Zwap, a networking platform that shares the same corporate entity. Klaaryo emerged from CDP Venture Capital's Frontech accelerator and presented at the program's Demo Day in January. There's also a Berkeley SkyDeck connection, though the company hasn't disclosed specifics about that relationship.
The money and what it buys
The fresh capital goes toward the expected priorities: team expansion, product development, deeper penetration in Italy before pushing into other European markets. Perhaps more importantly, it buys time to prove that early traction can evolve into something defensible.
The Techshop brings more than money to the table—though the €53 million Techshop I fund, backed partly by CDP Venture Capital, certainly doesn't hurt. The firm typically writes checks up to €1.5 million for pre-seed and seed B2B software companies, the kind that won't become unicorns overnight but might quietly become indispensable to specific industries.
Lucia Occhiuto and senior associate Beatrice Gragnoli from Occhiuto Legal handled the legal work for The Techshop on the M&A and venture aspects of the deal.
A bet on boring infrastructure
Klaaryo isn't operating in a vacuum. Paradox, Talkpush, Sense—all established players offering WhatsApp-enabled conversational hiring. The category isn't new. What Klaaryo is wagering on is that its European focus and vertical specialization in high-volume employers create enough differentiation to matter.
Timing might help, or hurt. Meta shifted to per-message pricing for WhatsApp Business template messages in mid-2025. Inbound messages within the 24-hour service window remain free, which matters when you're routing thousands of candidate conversations daily. Those unit economics are worth watching. A pricing change that seems minor on paper can wreck a business model built on volume.
For now, the company is concentrating on markets where frontline hiring remains a persistent headache—quick-service restaurants, hospitality, retail. The bet is that if Klaaryo can prove its model in those trenches, the path to broader adoption across Europe's high-volume hiring landscape becomes clearer.
Whether that thesis holds depends on execution, market conditions, and perhaps most of all, whether employers are finally ready to accept that recruiting software needs to meet candidates where they live, not the other way around. The funding gives Pedron and his team runway to find out.
