Dex, a London-based AI recruitment platform for software engineers, has hired two former founders for senior roles.
Tom Valentine, co-founder of travel deals site Secret Escapes, joins as chief operating officer. And Jonny Burch, co-founder of career development platform Progression, becomes head of design.
“Tom and Jonny have built businesses around problems that matter deeply to Dex, namely, how to scale a marketplace and how to help people build better careers. They’re joining our already world-class team to tackle those challenges head-on with us,” Paddy Lambros, Founder and CEO of Dex, said.
Valentine co-founded Secret Escapes in 2010, and he later served as executive chairman and chief operating officer at Fyxer AI, a startup that makes an AI executive assistant.
“Hiring engineers has been the hardest part of my job for about 20 years. In that time, I’ve seen all sorts of propositions to improve the experience for candidates and companies come and go.”
“AI now makes it possible to understand a candidate beyond a specific role in a way that just wasn’t previously possible. This is where the opportunity to build a truly candidate-centric recruitment business lies,” said Tom Valentine, Chief Operating Officer at Dex.
At Dex, he will lead commercial work and grow its core marketplace, which matches engineers with employers.
Burch co-founded Progression, which helps companies build career and skills frameworks. The startup was backed by LocalGlobe, Connect Ventures, and Village Global, and US firm Careerminds bought it in 2024.
“Although I’m a designer, I’m still a founder at heart. I love early-stage teams, difficult problems, and the autonomy to solve them. I want us to build a product so good that candidates recommend it because of the experience itself, regardless of whether we place them in a job,” said Jonny Burch, Head of Design at Dex.
At Dex, he will build the design team and lead the product that candidates use.
Dex’s AI “talent agent” talks to engineers about their skills, experience, and goals before matching them with jobs. It runs on a mix of AI models from Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
In April, the company raised a $5.3m seed round led by Notion Capital, Tech.eu reported, as investors also back other AI recruiting tools.
Founder and chief executive Paddy Lambros previously led early-stage talent teams at Atomico and Improbable.
He argues that startups should hire former founders, because AI agents now let smaller teams do much more.
“AI agents are expanding what leaner teams can achieve at a staggering rate. This means that the ability to decide what needs doing, get it moving quickly, and take responsibility for the result, makes human agency all the more valuable in today’s workplace. Former founders have spent years working this way,” Paddy Lambros, Founder and CEO of Dex, said.