Handshake

Career platform connecting students with employers.

HQ: San Francisco, CA, USA

Company research

Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals

Updated Aug 2, 2026

Overview

Handshake (Stryder Corp.) is a privately held career-technology company founded in 2014. Its current positioning is a career network for the AI economy: a three-sided marketplace connecting knowledge workers, educational institutions, and employers for career discovery, hiring, skills development, and AI-training work. The official site reports 25M knowledge workers, 1,600+ institutions, and 1M employers as of 2026-08-02.

Primary product

Handshake career network and marketplace, including student/alumni profiles, job and internship discovery, employer recruiting tools, university career-center software, and the newer Handshake AI expert-data/model-validation network.

Founded

2014

Headquarters

San Francisco, California, United States (225 Bush Street, Financial District).

Team size

Approximately 2,800–3,000 based on 2025–2026 third-party estimates; other directories report materially different figures, so an exact current count is unavailable.

Work style

Hybrid

Industry

Software Development / Human Resources Technology

Sub-industry

Career technology, higher-education technology, campus recruiting, talent marketplace, AI training data and model evaluation

Offices

San Francisco, California, United States

New York, New York, United States

Bangalore, India

United Kingdom

Berlin, Germany (listed by Built In)

Denver, Colorado, United States (listed by Built In)

Business model

Freemium marketplace: students and job seekers use the network free; employers and educational institutions pay for access and premium functionality.

B2B SaaS subscriptions for university career centers and employer recruiting teams.

Employer premium recruiting, messaging, targeting, analytics, applicant management, and job-promotion products.

Managed expert-data, model-validation, evaluation, and reinforcement-learning services for AI labs.

Emerging skills-development and enterprise AI-learning services through Uplimit integration.

Funding

Stage

Series F / late-stage private company

Total raised

$434M

Latest round

Series F · Jan 2022

Latest amount

$200M

Series F

Jan 2022 · Coatue Management and Valiant Peregrine Fund

$200M

Series E

May 2021 · Lightspeed Venture Partners and Spark Capital

$80M

Series D

Oct 2020 · GGV Capital

$80M

Series C

Oct 2018 · EQT Ventures

$40M

Series B

Dec 2016 · Spark Capital

$20M

Series A

Feb 2016 · Kleiner Perkins

$10.5M

Seed

Mar 2015 · True Ventures

$3.5M

People & investors

Leadership

Co-Founder & CEO

Co-Founder

Co-Founder

President and Chief Operating Officer

Jesse Hulsing

Chief Financial Officer

Matt Greenberg

Chief Technology Officer

Julia Stiglitz

Chief Education & Workforce Officer

Mallory Wheaton

Chief Customer Officer

Sahil Bhaiwala

Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, Handshake AI

Wes Field

Chief Commercial Officer, Handshake AI

Yang Zhao

Chief Business Officer, Handshake AI

Francisco “Paco” Guzmán

Head of AI Research, Handshake AI

Zayd Badwan

VP, GTM Learn

Jerry Lee

VP, Education Partnerships

Katie Viamari

VP, People & Talent

Investors

Work & culture

The company emphasizes “Students first,” “Olympic pace,” “Own the outcome,” “Invent and reinvent,” and “Leave nothing to chance.” The 2025–2026 refounding has shifted the culture and operating focus toward rapid AI execution, with office-heavy expectations reported by third parties alongside continuing remote postings.

Work style

Hybrid

Visa sponsorship

Yes

Compensation

Public job-specific salary evidence is limited. Ellis reports 25 H-1B LCAs in 2025 and a $190,000 median salary for sponsored positions; reported examples include Staff Software Engineer compensation of roughly $210,000–$270,000 and Strategic Projects Lead compensation of roughly $185,000–$190,000. These are immigration-filing signals, not a company-wide compensation band.

Benefits

Health and wellness benefits

Financial support

Growth and professional development

Paid time off / time off programs

Office meals, snacks, equipment, and social activities are described on the company About page

Flexible remote and office roles appear in the careers listings

Product & market

Pricing

Students use the platform free. Employers have free and paid tiers; premium recruiting suites add targeting, messaging, analytics, integrations, applicant management, and promotions. Universities pay for career-center software and access. Public third-party estimates place employer suite pricing from approximately $15,000 to several million dollars annually, but Handshake does not publish a universal price card.

Differentiators

—Institutional distribution through 1,600+ educational partners and verified student/alumni populations.
—Three-sided network linking talent, universities, and employers rather than a conventional general job board.
—Early-career specialization with targeting by school, major, GPA, graduation year, and related attributes.
—Large expert pool, including graduate-level specialists and PhDs, for AI model training and evaluation.
—Combination of recruiting, learning, verified skills, and AI-work opportunities.
—In-house sourcing, training, and quality-assurance workflow for Handshake AI.
—Longstanding university relationships and employer access, including broad Fortune 500 participation.

Technology

Google Cloud

Ruby monolith

Go microservices

Vertex AI

Gemini

Anthropic models

OpenAI Platform

Anyscale/Ray

PostgreSQL

GraphQL

Ruby on Rails

SAML/SSO

Arize AX

Datadog

GitHub Actions

Kubernetes

Docker

Salesforce

Tableau

Zendesk

Customers

Students, graduates, and knowledge workers

1,600+ colleges, universities, community colleges, and other educational institutions

Employers including Fortune 500 companies such as Google, Nike, and Target

Public school districts, healthcare systems, nonprofits, and sports organizations

Frontier AI labs and foundational-model companies using Handshake AI expert data and evaluation services

Enterprise customers associated with Uplimit, including Databricks, Clay, GE HealthCare, and Kraft Heinz

Competitors

Indeed

RippleMatch

Symplicity

Yello / WayUp

12twenty

Parker Dewey

JobTeaser

Mercor

Scale AI

Scale & contact

Estimated revenue

Approximately $300M ARR according to a July 2026 third-party estimate; separate April 2026 estimates put gross annualized revenue near $1.1B, including roughly $950M–$1B from AI training, with estimated net revenue around $450M after contractor payments. These are estimates and use different revenue definitions.

Estimated monthly visits

17.3M

Traffic estimate as of Jun 2026

team@joinhandshake.com 248-255-7341

Signals & risks

Layoff

Oct 2025

Third-party reporting said Handshake eliminated approximately 100 roles, about 15% of the U.S. workforce, during a refounding around AI; the company reportedly provided severance and equity-exercise accommodations.

Source

Acquisition

Jan 2026

Handshake acquired Cleanlab in an acqui-hire focused on AI evaluation, safety, reinforcement-learning environments, and data quality; nine Cleanlab employees joined Handshake.

Source

Acquisition

Jan 2026

Handshake acquired Taro, a software-engineer community and career platform, and launched a Software Engineer Talent Network for paid AI-lab projects.

Source

Acquisition

Jun 2026

Handshake acquired Uplimit to build an AI-native skills studio connecting project-based learning, verified credentials, and hiring. Deal terms were not disclosed.

Source

Other

Jan 2026

The strategic pivot creates concentration and execution risk: third-party research estimates AI-training gross annualized revenue near $1.1B while the legacy campus-recruiting business has weakened; AI revenue also depends on large labs and high contractor payouts.

Source

Latest news

Handshake acquires Uplimit to build a global AI learning platform

Handshake · Jun 2026

Handshake announced its acquisition of Uplimit to connect AI-native learning, verified skills, and hiring through a planned skills studio.

OpenAI and Handshake team up to help you create with Codex

Handshake · Mar 2026

Handshake partnered with OpenAI to give eligible students Codex credits and an AI-building challenge tied to portfolio and employer visibility.

AI data labeler Handshake buys Cleanlab, an acquisition target of multiple others

TechCrunch · Jan 2026

TechCrunch reported the Cleanlab deal as an acqui-hire bringing nine employees into Handshake research; terms were undisclosed.

Handshake acquires Taro

Handshake · Jan 2026

Handshake acquired Taro and launched a software-engineer talent network for paid AI-lab projects.

Handshake acquires Cleanlab

Handshake · Jan 2026

Handshake acquired Cleanlab to deepen its frontier-AI research capabilities in data quality, evaluations, RL environments, and human data.

Jobs and careers at Handshake

70 jobs at Handshake

Senior Software Engineer, Agentic Infrastructure

On-site

Engineering

San Francisco, CA; San Francisco, California, United States

Today

On-site

Full-time