Bengaluru Duo Builds an Interview Intelligence Ecosystem Uniting AI, Automation & Human Expertise for Modern Hiring Needs

In 2018, Ritu Mathran, a Chartered Accountant, went to a mid-size corporation for an interview.

Instead of the usual pre-interview anxiousness, she was shocked.

There was no one in the company capable of interviewing her properly for the technical round. Some questions were asked here and there, but nothing of substance.

“This wasn’t just Ritu’s experience. It was also a major pain point for companies that have technical roles – they need expertise but don’t really have the infrastructure to identify and hire it. There was a sheer absence of qualified interviewers. Many strong candidates were lost simply due to scheduling delays or inconsistent evaluations. That’s why we decided to solve for this very real business problem,”Anil Agarwal, co-founder of InCruiter, tells Startup Pedia in an exclusive interview.

Founded in 2018 and based in Bengaluru, InCruiter is an end-to-end Full-Stack Interview Intelligence and Interview Automation Platform that makes hiring talent for companies easier and faster.

THE BACKGROUND

In 2011, Anil Agarwal completed his engineering degree in the aerospace field from Punjab Engineering College. He then worked as an engineering manager with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) for over eight years.

As for his wife, Ritu Mathran, she holds multiple certifications from ICAI, including FAFD, Concurrent Audit, GST, and Forex & Treasury Management. She has worked for over five years at Tata Motors in a corporate finance role.

In 2018, after identifying key gaps in the recruitment industry, Anil and Ritu joined hands to start The Interviewer.

“We didn’t have any HR background. While you might think that is a disadvantage, it turned out to be completely different for us. It gave us a third-person point of view – and we were able to see recruitment as a broken operational system that needed complete redesign,” entrepreneur Ritu Mathran says.

The Interviewer began as India’s first freelance interviewer marketplace.

“We were connecting on-demand domain experts to companies that needed them to conduct technical interviews for their candidates. The problem was real, and we could see our solution being rapidly lapped up by everyone. Even the well-established companies,” startup founder Anil Agarwal says.

In its first few months, The Interviewer was able to complete more than 450 interviews for well-known B2B clients across India.

Once this model was successful, Ritu and Anil conducted more in-depth research and realized one thing: organizations were ready for a more intelligent and technology-driven method of hiring.

Very soon, the founders reimagined The Interviewer model into a B2B SaaS platform that could manage the entire interview lifecycle.

“We rebranded it as InCruiter, derived from the words INterviewer and reCRUITER. This means we solve problems for recruiters and interviewers and make hiring easy for both those who access and those who hire. Honestly, there was a long legal battle to even secure this name,” entrepreneur Ritu adds.

But then…the pandemic hit the world.

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JOURNEY AND CHALLENGES

Right when startup founders Anil Agarwal and CA Ritu Mathran had decided to revamp their model and build InCruiter as an end-to-end Full-Stack Interview Intelligence and Automation Platform, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world.

One of the worst industries? The global hiring one. It came to a halt.

InCruiter was almost shut down completely for three months. All previous team members had to be paid off and released from their contracts.

“At the same time, I started building a fintech startup for micro-investments and micro-savings. But even though InCruiter had shut down due to a lack of clients, we didn’t stop refining the model,” Anil Agarwal tells Startup Pedia.

The entrepreneurs used the time to improve automation, expand their interviewer network, and refine the core technology to make interviews run remotely with reliability and speed.

By August 2020, remote hiring and hybrid jobs took over, and InCruiter received a bunch of clients. The tech startup was reopened with just 5 team members working remotely across India.

It is important to note that InCruiter is one of the pioneering Interview-as-a-Service platforms in India. Ritu and Anil kept paving their path, despite the absence of a clear playbook to refer to.

Between 2021 to 2023, the virtual hiring automation industry started growing, with wider adoption being witnessed. Then, towards the end of 2023, InCruiter went neck-deep into artificial intelligence.

“As InCruiter grew in terms of conducting technical interviews and automating them, we discovered a new market opportunity. Companies sought a unified system that turned complex hiring operations into simple, trackable, and intelligent processes. And what could do that? Artificial Intelligence, of course. That is when we started building our Full-Stack Interview Intelligence Ecosystem powered by Agentic AI and Conversational AI technologies,” entrepreneur Anil Agarwal says.

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INCRUITER: ELIMINATING THE CHAOS IN RECRUITMENT

Today, InCruiter operates as an end-to-end Full-Stack Interview Intelligence and Recruitment Automation Platform that simplifies and streamlines the hiring process for companies, startups, and enterprises.

The platform automates the complete hiring life cycle from AI-based resume screening and AI-driven Phone Interviews to Conversational AI Video Interviews, Expert-based evaluations, feedback reporting, and secure proctoring. All these stages work together within one connected ecosystem, helping recruiters save time, reduce effort, and improve hiring accuracy.

“This is the evolution of what we started. We have built a structured system that uses automation to make hiring more efficient because a company’s growth depends on how effectively it hires,” says entrepreneur Anil Agarwal.

At the core of this innovation lies InCruiter’s Agentic AI engine, which plans workflows, assigns interviewers, manages schedules, evaluates responses, and generates feedback with minimal supervision.

“Our conversational AI recruiter conducts automated screenings, evaluates responses, and asks smart follow-up questions to understand candidate skills better,” adds startup founder Ritu Mathran.

The Agentic AI engine powers solutions such as AI Interview Software (IncBot), Conversational AI Recruiter (IncScreen), Video Interview Platform (IncVid), Interview Scheduling Software (IncFeed), and AI Proctoring System (IncProctor). Together, they create one unified ecosystem that speeds up hiring and ensures reliable, data-backed recruitment decisions.

By automating critical stages of recruitment, InCruiter helps organizations achieve up to 75 per cent faster hiring and 80 per cent cost savings while ensuring consistency and transparency throughout the process.

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GROWTH AND IMPACT

InCruiter is not just another automation tool that sources applicants or automates interview scheduling on the surface – it is an end-to-end platform that performs the heavy-lifting for the holistic ecosystem of the recruitment department within a company or organization.

“We are helping organizations with interview operations that think, act, perform, and learn independently and autonomously. Hiring managers can now focus more on decisions, and less on logistics,” startup founder Anil Agarwal says.

From a remote team of 5 people in 2020, InCruiter has grown into a tech startup with more than 75 professionals onin its team while remaining entirely bootstrapped.

Currently, it serves approximately 500+ clients across 7+ countries, including the United Kingdom, the Middle East, and the United States, and has hosted more than 10 million interview minutes globally.

In FY25, InCruiter has achieved a 2x jump in annual revenue, compared to last year. The founders credit this growth to the robust adoption of the Agentic AI engine of InCruiter.

For FY26-27, InCruiter is projecting an annual revenue of USD 5 million.

“InCruiter has one simple mission: help companies hire talent with speed and efficiency. A lot gets lost in the process of delays, late schedules, and interviews that don’t feel like they achieved what they originally set out to. With InCruiter, we have minimized frictions and maximized AI efficiency. We are already halfway to becoming a global end-to-end Full-Stack Interview Intelligence and Automation Ecosystem,” Anil Agarwal signs off. 

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