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Written by Amit Singh, Founder & CEO at Weekday
On August 24, 2023, TechCrunch's Catherine Shu covered Weekday's launch from stealth in a piece titled "Weekday puts the spotlight on job references." The article announced our $2.2 million seed round, led by Venture Highway with participation from angel investors, and told a part of the Weekday story that rarely makes it into funding headlines: the company exists because its own founders couldn't hire.
Forbes covered the same round on the same day with the David versus Goliath framing. The TechCrunch piece went somewhere more personal, and that's the story worth retelling here.
Three months to hire one engineer
Before Weekday, Amit Singh, Anubhav Malik, and Chetan Dalal were building a different startup. They needed an engineer. They had access to every job platform and networking tool on the market, and it still took them three months to make that first hire.
What finally worked wasn't a platform at all. It was their network. They got on video calls with friends and asked them to scroll through their own LinkedIn connections, flagging engineers worth talking to. That one change nearly doubled their candidate pipeline.
That was the insight Weekday was built to productize: the best candidates come through people who can vouch for them, but nobody's network is big enough on its own. Weekday set out to make that approach work at scale.
The data behind the problem
The TechCrunch article surfaced research that quantified what most founders feel intuitively. Weekday surveyed more than 200 companies on their hiring practices. Most ran basic background checks, verifying that candidates had no criminal record and had actually worked where their resume claimed. But fewer than 5% used reference checks from previous colleagues when making hiring decisions.
That gap matters because references are exactly the signal that predicts the things interviews can't: culture fit, collaboration, and how someone performs in a remote environment. By the founders' estimate, more than 95% of recruiters never sought referrals from a candidate's previous co-workers at all.
LinkedIn had a Recommendation feature, but it never filled this gap, because candidates supplied those recommendations themselves. A reference chosen by the candidate is a testimonial. A reference sourced independently is a signal. Weekday was built around the second kind.
How Backchannel worked
The product TechCrunch described centred on a feature called Backchannel. Recruiters connected their social graphs, through LinkedIn or phone contacts, and Weekday generated shortlists of around 100 candidates matched on experience, skills, sector, previous companies, academic records, and proximity to company leadership. Recruiters typically narrowed that to 10 or 12 people they wanted to learn more about.
For that final shortlist, Backchannel collected independent references. Weekday identified people who had worked in the same organisations as each candidate, then sent automated reference forms over WhatsApp and email. References usually came back within 24 hours, before a candidate's first introductory interview. Candidates stayed in control throughout: they could exclude their current employer from the process, and backchannel references were only collected once they chose to enter a company's hiring process.
At launch, the numbers were early but real. More than 120 companies had hired through Weekday, most headquartered in the US, with candidates concentrated in India and Southeast Asia. The platform had 62,000 active job seekers onboarded and 815,000 passive candidates in the database. Companies used Weekday for free and paid only on a successful hire.
From 815,000 profiles to 300 million
The TechCrunch article set public goals: 1,000+ companies, 250,000 active job seekers, and 2 million passive candidates by 2025. Reality moved faster and in a bigger direction.
Today, Weekday's database covers over 300 million profiles, roughly 90% of India's tech workforce. The reference engine evolved into a full AI recruiter that runs proactive outbound campaigns across email, WhatsApp, and phone, with response rates above 50%. After Y Combinator (W21) and the Venture Highway-led seed, General Catalyst came on as a backer. And the part of the model TechCrunch highlighted as candidate-friendly stayed exactly as it was: free to start, pay only on a successful hire, now backed by a 60-day replacement guarantee.
The founding problem hasn't gone anywhere. Hiring an engineer still takes too long when you rely on inbound applications and raw profile databases. Weekday remains the productized version of what its founders did out of desperation in their previous startup: go to the network, get the signal, and move fast on the people worth moving fast on.
Read the original article on TechCrunch: Weekday puts the spotlight on job references.
You can also read about Forbes' coverage of the same seed round: Weekday in Forbes: the story behind our $2.2 million seed round.
Last updated: June 2026
