NEW YORK CITY, April 2, 2025 – Ropes, the AI-driven platform transforming how engineering talent is evaluated, announced today it has raised $3.1M in seed funding. The seed round, led by GSV Ventures with participation from Box Group, will accelerate the company's mission to bridge the gap between technical assessment and real-world performance.

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In today's trillion dollar skills-based hiring market, accurately measuring technical abilities is the biggest obstacle to efficient hiring. Traditional asynchronous tests miss nuanced signals that human interviewers can detect, while live interviews are biased and cost hundreds of dollars per hour. With the rise of AI tools, candidate cheating is rampant across all mediums.

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Ropes has built a new way to vet technical talent in the AI era. Ropes delivers asynchronous assessments that are custom tailored to each role, providing real-world simulations unique to customer domains and tech stacks. Rather than just measuring if candidates pass predetermined test cases, Ropes evaluates how candidates approach problems from start to finish. This holistic evaluation reveals the nuanced technical abilities previously only visible during intensive live interviews.

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"The hiring process is fundamentally broken in the AI era," said Ken Schumacher, founder and CEO of Ropes. "Companies waste countless hours on tests and interviews consisting of puzzles easily solvable with the aid of AI. We've built Ropes to simulate the exact work of today's engineer, analyzing not just if they get the right answer, but how they approach complex problems from start to finish."

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“We invested in Ropes AI because they’re building AI to capture the most important aspects of the future workforce value chain: project based measurement of an individual’s skills and abilities,” said Deborah Quazzo, Managing Partner at GSV Ventures. “GSV sees this as the holy grail when coupled with the ability to identify areas for further skilling that optimize human performance across both individual employees and employers.”

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Ropes was founded by Ken Schumacher in June 2023. Prior to Ropes and upon graduating from Penn, Ken worked in ML research at Microsoft and led AI projects at Retool, building LLM products from scratch. He spent time interviewing hundreds of candidates experiencing the shortcomings of candidate screening, leading him to explore how AI would impact the labor market.

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Ropes is on a steep trajectory, growing from a few early pilot customers to helping dozens of recruiting teams and staffing firms find great candidates and boost revenue. Customers are particularly excited about Ropes’ immediate time-to-value and differentiated returns. This new funding will greatly accelerate Ropes’ development of its AI-driven assessment technology and expansion into other in-demand skill domains beyond engineering and IT such as nursing, design, finance, and more.

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"This funding enables us to accelerate towards a future where hiring is fair, fast, and genuinely skills-based” Schumacher said. “We see enormous potential to not only reshape technical hiring but fundamentally change how the world identifies and nurtures talent."

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About Ropes 

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Ropes is a software platform that bridges the gap between technical assessment and real-world performance. Ropes creates assessments unique to roles and evaluates candidates like humans do. Founded by Ken Schumacher, the company today serves in-house recruiting teams and staffing firms of all sizes looking for a new way to vet talent. For more information, visit www.ropes.ai or contact us at team@ropes.ai.