The round, led by Dogwood Ventures, highlights RefAssured’s momentum and exceptional financial performance
San Francisco, California – September 23, 2025 – RefAssured, a provider of automated reference checking solutions and performance insight for the staffing industry, today announced that it closed an oversubscribed seed round of $3.3 million, a milestone in the company’s rapid growth since it emerged from stealth two years ago.
RefAssured’s goal since its inception has been to propagate a system of record for talent performance insight for the staffing industry, the equivalent of the “back of a baseball card” for performance data. With millions of references already processed through the platform representing 20 million unique, structured data points on candidate soft skills, key attributes, team skills, and performance indicators – RefAssured provides an at-a-glance, 360-degree scorecard that answers two simple but mission-critical questions: can this person do the job, and how well can they do it?
In turn, this actively refreshed, structured data can feed and inform more intelligent, trustworthy, and empathetic AI. Forthcoming product releases will accelerate not just the volume of data amassed, but also the functionality unlocked by it. As certain skills rapidly and, in some cases, unpredictably grow and wane in demand, this performance insight is the new currency of employability. It informs not just present-day hiring decisions, but can help define the jobs of the future and the talent best suited to excel in an environment of increasing complexity and ambiguity.
RefAssured’s automated reference checking platform is built for staffing, offering unique advantages to the agencies that rely on it, including Vaco, Kelly Services (SETT), Soliant, LRS, Ingenovis Health, Triage, and Fusion Medical Staffing. RefAssured delivers a competitive advantage to its customers by allowing them to not only understand the quality of their talent, but also combat candidate fraud and improve the velocity of the placement process, all while facilitating sustainable pipeline growth. The company has maintained an unprecedented 100% customer referenceability score to date, meaning that all of its customers say that they derive strong value and ROI from the platform and would recommend it to other staffing agencies.
The seed funding round was led by Dogwood Ventures with support from HighSage Ventures. Strategic investors who participated in the round include: Bullhorn Ventures, LocumTenens.com, Jeff Bowling, Dan Campbell, Jeff Harris, and Belal Badat Ventures.
“I don’t take for granted the position that we’re in as a business that led us to this moment,” said Brian Vesce, CEO of RefAssured. “We are financially disciplined entrepreneurs who are dedicated to our customers and exceeding their expectations. Once we reached cash-flow breakeven, we wanted to raise a responsible amount of capital that would allow us to accelerate our operating and product development capacity. We also wanted to partner with investors who would lock arms with us and complement the culture and organizational values that we’ve worked very hard to build.”
RefAssured will deploy much of its new funding to strategically hiring across every department. RefAssured’s ambitious product roadmap – informed by customer conversations and collaborative feedback – centers on delivering features, new products, and innovative functionality designed to make the lives of staffing industry professionals better, and to focus on building things that really matter.
The company’s roadmap includes:
- Post-hire performance evaluations (currently in beta): demand for this is already high among the company’s existing customers across segments, and will enable agencies to capture objective third-party data and exit feedback on performance in a specific role, which can power redeployment and connect the dots between expectation and reality for clients.
- Advanced identity verification and fraud mitigation capabilities: while RefAssured already has sophisticated fraud detection features within its platform, the company plans to release a new solution designed to provide advanced identity verification seamlessly, at scale, uniformly.
- Universal candidate profiles: by creating a pooled talent ecosystem and giving agency and dignity to candidates to securely share their confidential reference wallet, RefAssured can increase speed and uniformity of submittal packages while dramatically simplifying onboarding and redeployment. This makes both sides of the hiring equation – recruiters and candidates – successful, which reduces friction and eliminates noise across the board.
- Job-to-match templates: gleaned from structured insight in post-hire performance evaluations, this allows RefAssured to grade talent, skills, and job fit. A preview of this future functionality is already available within the platform for existing customers.
RefAssured selected its investors based on rapport, track record, and expertise in areas of demonstrated product market fit. Dogwood Ventures, an Atlanta-based venture capital firm that partners with outlier founders at the early growth stage, led the round. Dogwood brings a unique network-based approach to helping founders scale, backed by the founders who built OneTrust, Flock Safety, SalesLoft, Pardot/Salesforce, and many others.
“We are thrilled to partner with Brian and the world-class team at RefAssured as they solve a large problem in the talent acquisition market,” said Aaron Hurst, Founding Partner at Dogwood Ventures. “Vetting high quality candidates is an ever-increasing challenge as companies are flooded with bot-generated applicants and fraudulent references. Artificial intelligence is accelerating this low trust environment. RefAssured has already demonstrated their leadership within the high-volume staffing industry, and we are excited to explore how their unique capabilities and dataset can evolve to solve new critical challenges in hiring.”
The round also drew institutional investor support from HighSage Ventures, a Boston-based investment firm. HighSage’s strategy is to make long-term investments in world-class companies run by exceptional, aligned operators who are focused on per share value creation. With no outside LPs, they maintain a long-term partnership mindset with their companies and the founders that run them.
The transaction closed on August 29, 2025.
About RefAssured
RefAssured is a provider of automated reference checking solutions and candidate performance insight for the staffing industry. With an extensible platform designed to improve efficiency, speed placements, provide hire quality, and unlock growth opportunities, RefAssured does more than just verify references – it validates decision-making. With a team comprised of successful serial entrepreneurs, staffing executives, and technology innovators, RefAssured is a platform for human potential. Visit https://www.refassured.com to get started.
Media Contact
Vinda Souza
Chief Marketing Officer
RefAssured
marketing@refassured.com