HR & recruiting

Contrario

Website
Founded 2025Origin source ↗Checked 2026-09-15

Overview

Contrario is an AI recruiting and hiring platform on a mission to help companies build generational teams.

In the age of AI, the best teams are still built by the best people. Recruiting has become a zero-sum game where speed and quality decide who wins.

Contrario is a network of expert recruiters supercharged by vertical AI agents purpose-built for hiring. Teams at Wispr Flow, Listen Labs, Slash, and 200+ of the fastest-growing companies use Contrario to power their hiring.

In under six months, Contrario has crossed $6M in annualized revenue, paid out $1M+ to recruiters, and placed 150+ candidates — making it one of the fastest-growing AI recruiting platforms on the market.

Backed by Y Combinator, Nexus Venture Partners, Goodwater Capital, and Inventum Ventures, alongside angels including David Chen (ex-HRT), Abhijeet Dwivedi (OpenAI), Hank Couture (DoorDash), and Jerry Cain (Stanford CS). Built by Stanford dropouts. Headquartered in San Francisco.

Company description As recorded 2026-11-08
LinkedIn
HR & recruitingAI agentBusinessesMarketplace

Founders & team

Arya Marwaha

Founder/CEO

Founder & CEO at Contrario. Stanford BS (left MS early). Previously built an edtech startup to six-figure ARR, worked in product dev at BCG, and conducted research at Stanford HCI.

LinkedIn X
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15

Aditya Sood

Founder/CTO

Founder & CTO at Contrario. Stanford BS graduate, Masters dropout. Led NLP at NASA, published AI research in defense tech, researcher at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) x Anthropic lab.

LinkedIn
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15
20team members reported
Source-reported As recorded 2026-09-15

Founded 2025 · Source

News & product activity

Sources & observations

Y Combinator

Profile depthverified profile
Website observationwebsite reachable
Last website check2026-11-11
Location · source statedSan Francisco, CA, USA
Pricing evidenceNo pricing page confirmed
Maturity: Operating · 3 of 6 areas documented

Source-based assessment · automated evidence rules

The company website explicitly reports customer or user adoption. This is a source-based assessment of a company claim; scale and revenue are not independently verified.

Company website: home Checked 2026-10-29

Trusted by teams at every stage for their critical hires.

Maturity is an evidence-based assessment, not a success rating. It may understate the current stage where evidence is limited. Coverage records documented areas, not a complete or independently audited company history.

Stage definitions
independent websitesource corroborationreachable websitedescriptive evidenceclassified market and modelsourced peoplesourced founding year
startup.observe Directory coverage · Sources & method