Our Story
We built what we wished existed when we were hiring
Drafted started as a question: why does every recruiting workflow assume you have to start cold? Every company already has a network. We built the tool that makes that network searchable and actionable.
Founded in Boston in 2024, Drafted raised $1.5M in angel funding in 2025 from investors who had felt the same pain as hiring managers. We have been in early access with talent teams at growing tech companies since early 2025.
Our Mission
Every role filled through a trusted introduction
Cold outreach is a symptom of a tooling gap, not a fixed constraint of how hiring has to work. Every company has employees with relevant professional relationships. The problem is those relationships are invisible until someone manually asks the right person at the right time. Drafted makes them visible and actionable without putting the cognitive load on employees to do the thinking themselves.
Relationships First
Hiring is fundamentally a human activity. The best hires happen through trust. We build tools that strengthen existing relationships rather than replace them with automation.
Privacy by Default
Employees own their own network data. We never sell it, share it outside your company, or use it for anything other than helping you make warm introductions to candidates.
Speed Through Focus
We build fewer things, better. Every feature in Drafted exists because a recruiter told us it was blocking a hire. We build for the workflow, not for the demo.
Measurable Outcomes
We care about time-to-fill, acceptance rates, and hire quality. Not engagement metrics. We measure ourselves by whether recruiting teams actually hire faster through warm introductions.
The Team
People who have felt the problem firsthand
Our team comes from talent acquisition, engineering at recruiting platforms, and partnership work at HR technology companies. We built Drafted because we lived the problem.
Vinayak Ranade
CEO and Co-founder
Vinayak spent years leading talent operations for fast-scaling engineering organizations, first as a practitioner and then building workforce-intelligence tools. He founded Drafted after watching skilled recruiters spend most of their day on cold outreach while their own team's connections went untouched.
Marcus Webb
Head of Engineering
Marcus's background is in graph database systems and network-mapping infrastructure built to handle high-throughput relationship queries at scale. He joined Drafted to apply that technical foundation to a problem he found personally interesting: the fact that most professional networks are invisible to the organizations that could most benefit from them.
Sofia Castellanos
Head of Partnerships
Sofia spent years growing partner ecosystems at HR-tech companies, connecting recruiting teams with the tools and workflows they already trusted. At Drafted she leads ATS integrations and works directly with our early-access customers to make sure the product fits how their teams actually hire.
Backed By
Investors who have hired the hard way
Our angel investors include founders and operators from talent technology and high-growth recruiting organizations who experienced the cold outreach problem firsthand. They backed Drafted because they wished it had existed when they were building their own teams.