Ishan Gupta

The list of fellows that the Thiel Foundation published in 2026 gives his hometown as Kanpur, India. Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry’s 2025 investment article states that Juicebox’s two founders are both immigrants, David Paffenholz from Germany and he from India. The Get the Check Podcast’s 2026 episode description states that he grew up in India watching his father run a business and always wanted to be an entrepreneur.⁠[1][2][3]

His founder profile on Y Combinator lists Seth Anandram Jaipuria School, Kanpur, under “Alumnus of.”⁠[4]

An announcement by Seth Anandram Jaipuria School in Kanpur, published by India Education Diary on August 26, 2020, states that Ishan Gupta, a Class 12 student at the school, won the Global Grand (First) Prize for STEM at the Crown Education Challenge 2020, a virtual international award; that he was the first and only Indian among the grand awardees; and that he received a cash prize of $500 and mentorship from founders, professors and industry figures. The prize was for his research on WorkDiCo, an application service using artificial intelligence and computer vision to optimize public places so as to reduce the spread of COVID-19. The announcement states that the research would be published in the Harvard Technology Review, and that the Crown Education Challenge, started in 2020, was co-organized by HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry and Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry to encourage students to take part in addressing global challenges and become active members of their communities.⁠[5]

David Paffenholz, co-founder and chief executive of Juicebox, recalled on A Product Market Fit Show in December 2025 that while working on Snap’s international growth team he helped organize a competition for high school seniors with a few friends from college; he said it was a research-paper competition with a COVID theme and that its winners got to meet Stephen WolframStephen WolframStephen Wolfram is a British-American computer scientist and physicist, founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, who led the creation of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language, wrote A New Kind of Science, and launched the Wolfram Physics Project.Open the full entry. Ishan was one of the participants and won the competition, which is how the two got to know each other, and Ishan later became his co-founder.⁠[6][7]

Paffenholz recalled that the first app the two built together got a few hundred users but did not retain them, and that the best thing about it was that he and Ishan really enjoyed working together; they then tried again with a music-focused app, in which users could connect their SpotifySpotifySpotify is an audio streaming subscription service offering on-demand music, podcasts, and audiobooks through a free ad-supported service and a paid Premium subscription. Its parent company, Spotify Technology S.A., is incorporated in Luxembourg, has its principal operations in Stockholm, Sweden, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker SPOT). It helped move the recorded-music business from buying and owning music to on-demand streaming and is one of the largest audio streaming subscription services by users.Open the full entry accounts to get personalized music recommendations and share song snippets, and which quickly reached 50,000 users.⁠[6]

His Y Combinator founder profile states that he previously worked as a software engineer at BlueLearn; its “Previously at” list names Droplet App, Inc., BlueLearn and Harcourt Butler Technical University.⁠[4]

His Y Combinator founder profile states that he studied computer science at Dartmouth CollegeDartmouth CollegeDartmouth College is a private institution of higher education in Hanover, New Hampshire, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded by Eleazar Wheelock, it received a royal charter on December 13, 1769. The 1819 Supreme Court ruling in Dartmouth College v. Woodward preserved its private status. Alongside undergraduate liberal arts education, Dartmouth includes the Geisel, Thayer, Tuck and Guarini schools. It enrolled 7,273 students in fall 2025 and held a $9 billion endowment at June 30, 2025. Sian Leah Beilock, in office since June 2023, remained president as of October 2026.Open the full entry before leaving to focus on building Juicebox through Y Combinator’s Summer 2022 batch (S22), and also lists Dartmouth College under “Alumnus of.” The Get the Check Podcast’s episode description states that he dropped out of college just three months in to build Juicebox.⁠[4][3]

Y Combinator’s company page states that Juicebox was founded in 2022 and belongs to Y Combinator’s Summer 2022 batch. TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry writes that the two founders attended Y Combinator in the summer of 2022. People Matters and Juicebox’s March 2026 press release state that Paffenholz and he were 22 and 19 when they started the business; TechCrunch likewise gives their ages at the time as just 22 and 19.⁠[7][8][9][10]

Paffenholz recalled that the team got into Y Combinator because it showed it could execute and the product had real usage, and that the co-founder dynamic was also important; a week or two after being accepted, before the batch started, the two decided not to continue with the music app. The Get the Check Podcast’s episode description states that Juicebox went through two ideas that did not work before this, a music company and a marketplace.⁠[6][3]

On what followed, TechCrunch writes that after Y Combinator the founders spent about two more years refining the product, while People Matters writes that the company spent the following year refining its technology.⁠[8][9]

Paffenholz recalled that PeopleGPT launched in May 2023 with a roughly ninety-second screen-recorded demo video posted on LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry; TechCrunch and People Matters write that Juicebox’s AI search engine, PeopleGPT, was ready for market in late 2023 and was then quickly adopted by customers ranging from small startups to large companies. TechCrunch writes that the search engine analyzes professional profiles, personal websites and other publicly available information to identify qualified candidates; People Matters writes that it uses large language models to identify candidates across professional profiles, personal websites and other public sources and, unlike older systems that rely on keyword matches, infers details much as a human recruiter does.⁠[6][8][9]

On Juicebox’s careers page the two founders write that in 2023 they saw how much time and judgment hiring lost to rigid systems and manual processes, and that a better approach combines human judgment with leading large language models to help teams find their next hire faster.⁠[11]

Paffenholz recalled that at that point the company had raised $1 million, $500,000 as part of its Y Combinator round and $500,000 after Y Combinator. Sequoia Capital writes that with just four people the team bootstrapped to $1 million in annual recurring revenue; Juicebox writes that this was before it took significant capital.⁠[6][2][12]

Paffenholz recalled that the company raised its seed round in the fall of 2024 and that it was $5 million; Y Combinator’s company page states that NFDG led the seed round.⁠[6][7]

On September 25, 2025, TechCrunch wrote that Juicebox had raised a $30 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital, bringing its total funding to $36 million, and that within a short time it had reached more than 2,500 customers and over $10 million in annual recurring revenue. TechCrunch writes that Sequoia partner David Cahn first heard about the company from an early-stage founder who had used Juicebox for all of his recruiting and hired more than a dozen people without a professional recruiter, and that Cahn said he had rarely seen a four-person company reach 2,000 customers. The article states that the company had since hired eight more employees and had no sales team.⁠[8]

A Juicebox blog post published the same day states that CoatueCoatueCoatue is a technology- and innovation-focused investment management firm founded by Philippe Laffont in 1999, operating in both public and private markets. Its current website lists Thomas Laffont as co-founder and chief investment officer of private investments; a Form ADV filed on July 29, 2026, disclosed regulatory assets under management of $92,705,722,582.Open the full entry, NFDG, Y Combinator, Lux CapitalLux CapitalLux Capital is a U.S. venture capital firm founded in 2000 by Peter Hébert, Josh Wolfe and Robert Paull, with offices in New York and Silicon Valley. Focused on emerging science and technology, the firm backs companies in fields including life sciences, artificial intelligence, robotics, manufacturing, aerospace and defense through fund investments and by helping to found companies.Open the full entry and BOND also took part in the round and that its customers include teams at RampRampRamp is a corporate financial technology company founded in 2019 by Eric Glyman, Karim Atiyeh and Gene Lee. It provides corporate cards, expense reimbursement, bill payments, procurement and finance automation. Glyman and Atiyeh became co-CEOs in June 2026.Open the full entry, QuoraQuoraQuora is an American question-and-answer and knowledge-sharing website and the company that operates it, Quora, Inc., whose core product centers on users asking, answering, and voting to rank content; since 2022, the company has also offered Poe, a chat platform that aggregates AI models from multiple companies.Open the full entry and PerplexityPerplexityPerplexity is a San Francisco–based artificial intelligence company founded in 2022, known for its “answer engine” that gives answers with cited sources, and it has also launched products such as the Comet browser.Open the full entry; it states that the two founders developed Juicebox from their own experience of the inefficiencies of traditional recruiting and that both have technical expertise in large language models. People Matters writes that the customers include companies such as CognitionCognitionCognition is a U.S. artificial intelligence company founded by Scott Wu, Walden Yan and Steven Hao that develops the autonomous AI software engineer Devin. It launched Devin in March 2024, acquired the AI coding tool Windsurf in July 2025, and announced a Series E exceeding $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation in September 2026. Its annualized revenue passed $1 billion that month.Open the full entry, Ramp and Perplexity, that the company had grown to around a dozen employees, and that it had no formal sales team and relied on word of mouth and customer referrals.⁠[12][9]

In an article published the same day, Sequoia Capital partners David Cahn, Abhishek Malani, Lauren Reeder and Brian HalliganBrian HalliganHubSpot co-founder, founder coach and investor.Open the full entry announced that the firm was leading the Series A; the article states that the two founders spent years iterating and became deep experts in both talent workflows and large language models, and that the company had scaled to $10 million in annual recurring revenue and 2,500 customers. Sequoia Capital’s founder page lists him as co-founder and chief technology officer of Juicebox, with 2025 as the year of partnership.⁠[2][13]

On the timing of the Series A, Juicebox’s March 2026 press release states that the company had tripled its annual recurring revenue since its Series A in July 2025, while its April 2026 press release states that Juicebox announced its $36 million Series A in September 2025 and that the Series B came only five months later. Juicebox’s careers page states that the company reached $10 million in annual recurring revenue in September 2025.⁠[10][14][11]

On March 10, 2026, Juicebox announced an $80 million Series B at an $850 million valuation, led by DST GlobalDST GlobalDST Global is a technology investment firm founded by Yuri Milner in 2009 that focuses on growth-stage investments in internet companies worldwide; it has invested in companies including Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, JD.com, Airbnb and Spotify, and in 2026 led the US$400 million Series B round of the AI visual content company Higgsfield.Open the full entry with participation from Sequoia Capital, Coatue, Y Combinator, NFDG and Verified Capital. The press release states that the company had tripled its annual recurring revenue since its Series A, that it served 5,000 customers including fast-growing technology companies and Fortune 100 brands, with Ramp, CursorCursorCursor is the trading name of U.S. AI coding software company Anysphere, Inc. and its namesake coding tool. Founded by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, it began as an AI-native development environment forked from VS Code and later shifted toward agent-centered coding. Its November 2025 Series D valued the company at $29.3 billion post-money; on August 14, 2026, SpaceX completed an all-stock acquisition at an implied equity value of $60 billion, making Cursor a wholly owned subsidiary.Open the full entry and Samsara among them, and that the platform had powered more than 560,000 searches and engaged over 3 million candidates; the funds were to go to product development, enterprise go-to-market expansion and international presence, starting with a London office later that year.⁠[10]

Juicebox’s blog post of the same day states that Committed Capital also took part in the round, that the company had raised $116 million in total, and that more than 5,000 recruiting teams use large language models to source talent on Juicebox; the post is signed “David & Ishan,” Juicebox’s co-founders. On the Get the Check Podcast episode released on March 13, 2026, he announced the Series B as Juicebox’s chief technology officer and co-founder.⁠[15][3]

On April 20, 2026, the Thiel Foundation announced its 2026 class of Thiel Fellows, listing him fourth. The announcement describes his project as Juicebox building an AI recruiter that helps companies make better hiring decisions, with agents that understand real skills and move hiring from guesswork to true meritocracy. The announcement states that the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry was established in 2011 and has more than 300 previous fellows, and that each fellow in the class receives $250,000 over two years and must commit to working full-time on their project, company or idea.⁠[1]

On April 21, 2026, Juicebox announced that it had been named to Notable Capital’s inaugural Prosumer AI 40. The release states that its AI search, PeopleGPT, takes natural-language requests and returns ranked candidates from 800 million profiles across more than 30 sources, and that its customers include Cursor, Cognition, Ramp and Samsara.⁠[14]

As of November 2026, Y Combinator’s company page states that Juicebox has a team of 100, is located in San Francisco and has Harj Taggar as its primary Y Combinator partner; that it serves more than 5,000 customers, from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies, including Ramp and Notion; that it is on a path toward $100 million in annual recurring revenue; that it was named in 2026 to ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry’s Next Billion-Dollar Startups list and LinkedIn’s Top Startups list; and that it has raised $116 million, including a $30 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital and an $80 million Series B led by DST Global, with investors also including Lux Capital. Job listings on Juicebox’s careers page give its work locations as San Francisco, New York and London.⁠[7][11]

He appeared on episode 64 of the InProd podcast (formerly Partner Path), “E64: Reinventing How Teams Find Talent with Ishan Gupta (Juicebox).” The show notes state that he described how the team pivoted from earlier ideas toward the most valuable part of hiring, identifying the right people and getting them into process; users describe the candidates they want in plain language, and the platform searches more than 800 million professional profiles, surfaces strong matches and engages candidates through recruiting agents. The episode also covers Autopilot, which the show notes call a breakout feature that uses large language models to evaluate candidates semantically and rank them against nuanced criteria and that drove organic growth and strong product-market fit; why the platform’s data makes the product sticky; how recruiting may evolve over the next five years; the decision to raise a later Series A; the company’s culture of moving fast and being intellectually honest; and an upcoming memory layer showing what the AI learns over time. Its chapters include competitive programming, naming the company and the pivot during Y Combinator.⁠[16]

Juicebox: Official website: https://juicebox.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18]

X: Public account: https://x.com/ishangpta (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ishan-gupta-7203a91a3/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]