Collective is on a mission to redefine how professional recruiters and consulting companies source talent. The Paris-based startup has built Sherlock, an AI sourcing agent that screens over 800 million profiles across 30+ public data sources and surfaces the most relevant candidates for a given role in minutes. With around one million candidates registered directly on the platform, Collective works on both sides of the hiring equation: helping recruiters source candidates faster, and helping talent get found.
Founded by Jean de Rauglaudre, Collective went through a significant pivot before reaching its current form: what began as a platform connecting freelancers into teams has now evolved into a fully technology-driven product. The transformation was demanding, but it paid off: within two years of the pivot, Collective grew to €2M ARR.
This summer, Collective raised €2M on a €25M pre-money valuation. Rather than turning to traditional VCs, Jean chose to raise from 40+ industry insiders: founders, executives, and operators from the recruiting and consulting world, grouping smaller tickets through a Roundtable SPV to keep the cap table manageable.
In this interview, he shares how that strategy enabled him to turn investors into ambassadors, how Roundtable helped absorb the legal and administrative complexity of a multi-investor round, and what advice he would give other founders considering a similar approach.
Key takeaways:
- Collective raised €2M from 40+ industry insiders by routing tickets under €100K through a Roundtable SPV. This enabled them to keep the cap table clean while bringing on investors who had genuine skin in the game.
- The SPV threshold that Jean de Rauglaudre set (investors who put in more than €100K got direct equity) doubled as a negotiating tool, creating natural pressure for investors to increase their commitment.
- The platform absorbed all the legal and administrative complexity (KYB, KYC, document management, and investor tracking), giving the founding team back the time and focus needed to close the round and work on the business.
- Those 40+ investors became Collective’s active ambassadors: with 40+ LinkedIn posts already planned, the company turned its funding round into a sustained content and visibility engine.
Roundtable: Could you introduce Collective and tell us about its mission?
Jean de Rauglaudre: Collective builds an AI-powered sourcing and recruitment tool for professional recruiters and consulting companies. Think of it as the ChatGPT for recruiters. Where traditional tools like LinkedIn require manual filtering, Collective’s AI agent, named Sherlock, takes a brief from the recruiter and runs searches across 30+ data sources automatically: LinkedIn, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and more. It surfaces the most relevant candidates for a given role, in a fraction of the time.
On top of aggregating publicly available data, we’ve built a private database of candidates who register on Collective to find business and job opportunities. We now have around one million people registered on the platform.
Essentially, Collective works on both sides: recruiters use it to source talent faster, and candidates use it to get discovered by businesses.
Roundtable: The company seems to have gone through a significant evolution, can you tell me more about that?
Jean de Rauglaudre: We have. Collective started as something quite different: a platform connecting freelancers into teams and matching those teams with companies. That’s actually where the name comes from: collectives of freelancers.
Over time, we expanded our vision from freelancers to all types of talent. Then, with the rise of AI, we made the decision to pivot: instead of betting on connections between people, we’d build a technology product. That pivot was painful. We went from a team of 50 people down to six or seven. Our revenue dropped.
But it worked. In the first year after the pivot, we grew to €200K ARR. The year after, from €200K to €2M. We closed this summer’s funding round at €2M ARR.
Roundtable: Can you tell us more about this funding round?
Jean de Rauglaudre: The fundraise was €2M on a €25M pre-money valuation. The French business is profitable, so we weren’t raising out of necessity; instead, we were raising to fund international expansion, which requires cash.
Given the company’s valuation, we were deliberate about not raising too much. Two million is enough to move the needle on our revenue without giving up excessive equity.
We also made a conscious choice not to go back to traditional VCs for this round. Instead, we raised from 40+ leaders in our industry: founders and executives from consulting firms and recruiting companies, and influencers in our space. Those are the experts with genuine knowledge and networks relevant to what we’re building.
The logic is simple: when those people are invested in your success, they actively work for you. They talk about you, post on LinkedIn, make introductions. We already have 40+ LinkedIn posts planned about the round and we’ve started a series unveiling a new investor each week. It creates a virtuous cycle of visibility and credibility that you just don’t get with a traditional VC-only round.
We also set a threshold: tickets of €100K or more went directly into the cap table. Smaller tickets were grouped through Roundtable’s SPV. For investors who wanted direct equity, that threshold also became a useful negotiating tool: if someone wanted to invest €60K directly into the business, they either had to increase their commitment or do it through the SPV.
Roundtable: Now that the round is closed, what are your priorities?
Jean de Rauglaudre: Currently, we have three main priorities:
- First, going upmarket in France: we’re working more and more with large accounts and significant deals, and that’s roughly a third of our focus.
- Second, international expansion: currently, about 85% of our users are based in France and 15% are abroad, mainly in Europe and North Africa. The fundraise we completed this summer is our launchpad to expand into Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the UK, and Spain, with Canada as a potential market down the line.
- And third, product and tech: we have features to ship and develop that are central to supporting both of those goals.
Roundtable: What shaped your decision to use Roundtable for the SPV?
Jean de Rauglaudre: I’ve known the founders for a long time: both of our companies went through Hexa, so that’s where we met. A couple of years ago, I invested a small amount into Roundtable when they raised. So I already knew the product from the investor side.
When it came time to raise this summer, I quickly realized that managing 40+ smaller investors with all the legal and administrative challenges (KYB, KYC, varying ticket sizes, and so on) was going to be a nightmare if I were to do it myself. Roundtable was the obvious solution. It’s built precisely for that kind of complexity.
Roundtable: What was your experience with the platform?
Jean de Rauglaudre: Honestly, it felt almost like a game and I loved that. Watching the round fill up day by day, seeing the completion rate climb from 80% to 90%, and more, was really fun.
Additionally, the team was responsive, bottlenecks were easy to identify and resolve, and the overall experience was very smooth. I’ll definitely use it again, and we’re actually planning to open a new round soon.
Roundtable: For you, what are the main operational benefits of using Roundtable?
Jean de Rauglaudre: The simplicity and the time saved. Managing 40 individual investors, each with their own documents, questions, and timelines, would have been enormously complex to do manually. Roundtable absorbed all of that.
Investor feedback was also largely positive. There was one case where someone didn’t invest because they preferred direct equity rather than investing through an SPV structure, but those were the conditions we set.
Roundtable: Any advice for founders considering a similar approach?
Jean de Rauglaudre: Raising from people within your ecosystem, i.e. clients, leaders, and operators, is a genuinely underrated strategy. You get a community of people who are incentivized in your success and who become active ambassadors of your company. It’s a completely different kind of capital than VC money.
The content and visibility alone is remarkable. Forty people posting about your company on LinkedIn is a serious distribution asset, and one that you simply can’t buy. And every week, introducing a new investor publicly creates ongoing momentum and social proof.
I now have the feeling that those 40 people are working for me; not full-time, of course, but working for me regardless. Because they invested in the company. That’s the real value of being able to bring so many investors on board with an SPV.
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