Abu Dhabi-Based Professional.me Nets US$3.1 Million From Raha Beach Ventures

Abu Dhabi-based HR technology (HR tech) company Professional.me has raised US$3.1 million in a seed funding round led by the Abu Dhabi–based startup studio Raha Beach Ventures, which brings the total funding it has secured to $4.6 million.

Founded by Ryan Adams, Megan Adams, and Matt Schmid in the US in 2024, the company is rethinking recruitment with personalized micro–large language models (LLMs)—custom-trained language models for both employers and professionals. 

Inc. Arabia spoke with Ryan Adams, the entrepreneur straddling roles as co-founder and CEO of Professional.me and Managing Partner of Raha Beach Ventures to unpack how his startup is rethinking recruitment, why this latest raise matters, and what the future of hiring might look like in an AI-driven world. 

“This raise was unconventional—I'm actually the Managing Partner of Raha Beach Ventures, so I was on both sides of the table," Adams said. "But that made the process more rigorous, not less. Raha Beach Ventures exists to build companies that solve hard problems. Not just technically difficult ones, but problems where the current solutions are fundamentally misaligned with reality. Before landing on Professional.me, we evaluated dozens of ideas. Each one had to answer the same question: why hasn't this been solved properly yet? Most ideas failed that test: they were features, not companies, or the problem wasn't actually that painful." 

Adams revealed that Professional.me emerged after hours of conversations with recruiters, founders, and hiring managers, with him and his team realizing that hiring platforms weren’t failing because of design flaws or missing functions—they were broken at the data layer. "They don't understand talent," Adams pointed out. "They just match keywords. That's a hard problem worth solving."

Professional.me was thus built to directly confront one of recruitment’s biggest challenges: the overwhelming mismatch between talent and job postings. Since launching in October 2024, Professional.me has created more than 300,000 professional profiles, built a user base across Europe, the UK, and the MENA, and gained over 138,000 followers on professional networks. The platform, which integrates with applicant tracking systems, offering artificial intellignce (AI)-based shortlists, real-time skill inference, and context-aware matching, has also been recognized with industry awards, including the GITEX Europe Award from AI Everything Global and a Bronze Stevie Award for Technology Excellence. 

According to Adams, what sets Professional.me apart is not speed, but depth—its models capture the unseen strengths that résumés and job titles overlook. “Most people hear 'LLM' and think we're using AI to read resumes faster—we're not," he said. "We're solving a different problem entirely. Traditional hiring tools, even the AI-powered ones, only see what's on paper. They miss that your best sales development representative (SDR) might be a former teacher who understands relationship-building, or your next DevOps engineer might be labeled 'backend developer,' because they've been automating deployments on the side.” 

By utilizing personalized micro-LLMs, the Professional.me platform analyzes organizational structures, team dynamics, goals, and past hiring outcomes to create predictive success profiles benchmarked against industry peers. For professionals, it expands on résumés by capturing public signals such as portfolios, published work, and peer recognition, alongside private indicators like certifications, mentoring, and internal impact. This is how Professional.me shifts from being just another hiring tool to becoming an intelligence layer—building tailored models that understand both sides of the equation.

“Your company's model understands your actual organization: what drives success, your tech stack, your culture," Adams explained. "The professional's model sees beyond job titles to their real capabilities: actual project outcomes, published work, and peer recognition. Trained on 167 industries and 1.2 million tasks, these models create matches based on deep understanding, not keywords."

Adams also noted that the platform’s true value emerges when theory meets practice—when overwhelmed hiring teams regain control of their pipelines and start seeing measurable savings in both time and cost. “One engineering firm had stopped posting jobs entirely," he shared. "They were paying recruiters $15,000 per hire, not because they couldn't find talent, but because they couldn't handle the volume of applicants. A manufacturing client in Dubai had the same problem: over 3,000 applications for one role. After using our system, they told us we saved them 10 days of review time and surfaced candidates who were actually right for the role. That engineering firm? They're posting jobs again, saving $15,000 per hire. The manufacturing client? They review dozens of candidates, instead of thousands.” 

With Professional.me now securing fresh capital, Adams shared with Inc. Arabia details about the company’s next phase of growth. “This raise does three things," he said. "It lets us scale what's working, build what's missing, and prove what's possible." To kick things off, Professional.me plans to widen its focus beyond employers. “Right now, companies use our micro-LLMs to understand candidates," Adams explained. "But professionals deserve their own AI advocates too. Within 3-6 months, we'll launch tools that help job seekers understand their market value, identify skill gaps, and discover roles they didn't know they qualified for. Same intelligence, flipped perspective. Imagine knowing which companies actually need your specific mix of skills before you even apply."

Geographic growth is also on the agenda, Adams added. “We're already processing candidates from 45 different countries, but we're only scratching the surface," he said. "The UAE taught us that global talent is everywhere; it's just invisible to traditional tools. We're building dedicated models for the MENA, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Not translations, but models that understand local credentials, career paths, and what success looks like in different markets."

At the same time, Professional.me is doubling down on refining its technology backbone. “We're tracking 1.2 million tasks across 167 industries, but every hire teaches us something new," Adams said. "Every edge case makes the models smarter. We're investing heavily in feedback loops, performance tracking, and model refinement. The difference between 85 percent and 95 percent accuracy is the difference between a useful tool and a transformative one." 

Looking ahead, Adams has a clear set of milestones in sight. “By year-end, 10x the number of companies using the platform, our first million professionals with their own micro-LLMs, and proof that this works at scale," he predicted. "We're already seeing 99 percent reduction in screening time and $15,000 savings per hire. Those aren't edge cases anymore, they're becoming the norm.” But there's a bigger vision at play as well. “We're building the infrastructure for how talent and organizations find each other," Adams said. "Not another job board or applicant tracking system (ATS), but the intelligence layer that makes everything else work better. Every resume becomes a complete story. Every job posting finds the right person. Every professional knows their worth.” 

Reflecting on Professional.me's funding journey, Adams suggested that it holds important lessons for other entrepreneurs. “Investors aren't just evaluating your idea, they're evaluating you," Adams pointed out. "They need to believe three things: you understand the problem deeper than anyone else, you have a unique ability to solve it, and you have the drive to push through when it gets brutal. Show them your depth. If you're pre-product like we were, that depth comes from customer insights, not slides. Talk to people living the pain until patterns emerge that others miss. And when you pitch, skip the buzzwords—if you can't explain your idea clearly to someone outside the industry, you probably don't understand it well enough yourself. In my experience, the money follows conviction.”

Pictured in the lead image are Professional.me co-founders Matt Schmid, Megan Adams, and Ryan Adams. Image courtesy Professional.me.