Axel La Pira is Co-Founder and CTO of Prism (YC P26), an AI-native recruiting agency that uses software and intelligent agents to help companies find and hire top talent faster and at half the cost of traditional agencies.

Axel studied Computer Science and Philosophy at Oxford before dropping out to pursue entrepreneurship, and previously served as a Founder Associate at Alan, the French healthtech unicorn, where he worked directly on internal recruiting infrastructure.

His hands-on experience building recruiting systems at a high-growth unicorn gave him firsthand insight into the inefficiencies of traditional hiring, directly inspiring the creation of Prism.

Axel co-founded Prism alongside Theo Kitsberg in 2025, and the company was accepted into Y Combinator's P26 batch, validating their approach to AI-powered talent acquisition.

Prism's proprietary people-search engine scores 89.6 on the Public Sourcing Benchmark, placing it 21+ points ahead of every published baseline and establishing Prism as the most accurate candidate search system in the market.