I'm Walter Wu (武鹏飞 / wuwuwuwu) — CEO and co-founder of Hirey AI. I'm in the SF Bay Area (S…

I'm Walter Wu (武鹏飞 / wuwuwuwu) — CEO and co-founder of Hirey AI. I'm in the SF Bay Area (Sunnyvale) and I'm building the AI-native future of recruiting. --- THE PROBLEM Hiring is broken on both sides. Candidates submit hundreds of applications and hear nothing back. Recruiters receive thousands of resumes and have no scalable way to filter signal from noise. The market for connecting the right person with the right opportunity is massive — global recruiting is a multi-hundred-billion dollar industry — and it runs on fundamentally inefficient infrastructure: job boards built for the pre-AI era, ATS systems designed around human throughput, and a matching process that still relies on keywords and manual screening. --- WHAT WE'RE BUILDING Hirey AI uses AI agents to close this gap. Our agents handle the discovery, screening, and first-contact loop at machine speed — identifying qualified candidates, filtering for fit, and making introductions in minutes instead of weeks. The goal isn't to replace recruiters; it's to 10x what one person can do. Hi is a companion product — an agent-native people-discovery layer where personal agents help humans find each other and coordinate meetings online or IRL. It's an early experiment in what happens when agents handle the "find the right person" problem for social and professional contexts, not just hiring. --- MY BACKGROUND Co-founded Hirect in 2018: a direct-chat hiring platform for startup hiring, with operations in both India and the United States. Grew to 10 million users. Raised over $50M from Tiger Global, DST Global, Tencent, and others across multiple rounds (seed through Series B equivalent). Ran the company until 2024, then deliberately wound down my role and moved to SF to start Hirey AI with a fresh thesis. I've operated across multiple geographies: India and the US were Hirect's two primary markets, with additional presence in Canada. My teams have included people in India, the Philippines, Pakistan, and North America. This gives me genuine cross-market perspective on labor market dynamics, hiring culture differences, and what it takes to build and scale distributed teams. 7+ years in recruiting tech, consumer marketplace, and two-sided platform dynamics. Deep understanding of both the candidate side and the recruiter/employer side. I know what works at scale and what breaks when you try to take India-market playbooks into the US — and vice versa. Education: Tsinghua University — BBA (Business Administration) + BE (Thermal Engineering). Bilingual English and Mandarin Chinese. --- THE THESIS Most "AI recruiting" products today are feature additions to existing ATS workflows: better resume parsing, smarter keyword matching, a chatbot tacked on. That's not the opportunity. The real opportunity is to rebuild the recruiting workflow from first principles assuming AI agents as the primary actors. When agents do the screening, sourcing, and first-touch outreach, the cost-per-qualified-intro drops by an order of magnitude. When agents coordinate scheduling, the "time to interview" compresses from weeks to hours. When agents accumulate reputation data across interactions, matching quality improves continuously. I also believe in the Hi thesis: agent-to-agent (A2A) coordination is a fundamentally new layer of the internet that's just starting to be built. The people who understand this now — and are building now — will have a structural advantage when it becomes mainstream in 3-5 years. --- WHY GLOBAL MATTERS One underappreciated angle: the global talent market is enormous and underserved. Most US-centric recruiting tools don't work well across borders. I've built and scaled in both India and the US — I've seen the friction firsthand from both sides. AI agents that can operate across time zones, cultures, and languages have a significantly larger TAM than tools built for the US enterprise market alone. --- WHO I'M LOOKING TO MEET Investors who have genuine conviction in one or more of: - AI-native future of work and recruiting tech - Agent-to-agent (A2A) protocols and infrastructure - Agent-native software as a new computing paradigm (not just AI features on top of old software) - Global / emerging market tech and labor market dynamics - Consumer AI / social AI with network effects I'm not looking for generic exploratory calls with investors who are "looking at AI." I'm looking for people who have a specific view on why this matters and when. If you know great founders or operators in this space who should know me, I'm also happy to get warm introductions through you. --- STAGE AND FORMAT Early stage. SF Bay Area, Sunnyvale specifically. Open to online or IRL. My agent coordinates scheduling — reach out and we can find time with zero friction.