Built for India's 5.4M tech professionals

The AI operating system for your job search

Replace the 8-tool chaos of spreadsheets, ChatGPT tabs, LinkedIn, Naukri, and resume formatters with one AI-native pipeline — from strategy to placement, with persistent context at every stage.

No credit card. 10 free applications/month. Razorpay + Stripe checkout when you upgrade.

forgeahead.app / pipeline
  1. P1

    Strategy

    Hunt plan + skill gaps

  2. P2

    Profile

    ATS score + rewrite

  3. P3

    Apply

    Match + kanban

  4. P4

    Referral

    Drafted outreach

  5. P5

    Interview

    Mock + coaching

LangGraph orchestrator · Gemini · 9 AI features livelive
The problem

Job hunting is the most consequential thing most professionals do with zero tooling.

Recruiters get a CRM. Sales teams get pipelines. Job seekers — who are literally selling themselves — get a spreadsheet and willpower.

11 weeks

Average job search duration

Three months of evenings and weekends — and most of it spent on coordination, not interviews.

100+

Applications per search

Spread across Naukri, LinkedIn, careers pages, WhatsApp groups, and a Google Sheet you stop updating by week 3.

<5%

Average response rate

Generic resumes. Cold-applies with no referral. No follow-up sequences. The math punishes the unstructured.

Nobody connects strategy → resume → apply → referral → interview into a single workflow with memory and context. We did.

The 5-phase pipeline

One workflow. Five phases. Context flows forward.

Your strategy informs your resume. Your resume scores against specific jobs. Your applications feed your referral outreach. Your outreach history shapes your interview prep. No other tool does this.

  1. Phase 1

    Strategy

    Personalized hunt plan

    • Weekly goals & cadence
    • Skill-gap analysis
    • Target company shortlist
  2. Phase 2

    Profile

    ATS-grade resume engine

    • Score against each job
    • AI rewrite for the JD
    • LinkedIn profile audit
  3. Phase 3

    Apply

    Match, score, track

    • Job-resume fit explanations
    • Kanban application tracker
    • Bulk apply queue (auto-apply WIP)
  4. Phase 4

    Referral

    Outreach that converts

    • Contact CRM
    • AI drafts for LinkedIn / email / WhatsApp
    • Sent via dedicated AgentMail inboxes
  5. Phase 5

    Interview

    Coached, not just quizzed

    • Company brief + question bank
    • AI mock interview with feedback
    • Salary negotiation coach

This is not “ChatGPT with a job-search prompt.” It's a structured workflow where the AI has persistent context across your entire search — resume, JDs, outreach history, mock interview notes, salary signals.

Trusted infrastructure

Built on the same stack the best AI products run on.

  • Anthropic
  • Gemini
  • LangGraph
  • Razorpay
  • Stripe
  • AgentMail
0

AI features live

0

Pipeline phases

0+

Mock interview questions

0x

Tools replaced

“Job-hunting is the worst UX in tech. We're rebuilding it as one calm pipeline — not eight chaotic tabs.”
FounderForgeAhead, Bengaluru
Currently using daily
Why now

Three forces converged in 2025–26.

The model quality, the market, and the moat all opened in the same window. This category gets built once.

2024–26

LLMs can finally do the work

Resume rewriting, outreach drafting, and mock interviews require generation quality that only crossed the “actually useful” threshold in the last 18 months. LangGraph + tool-use makes multi-step agentic workflows production-ready.

5.4M+ pros

India’s job market is in a perfect storm

5.4M+ tech professionals, 70%+ first-2-year attrition, and a culture of switching every 18–24 months. Millions are actively searching at any moment — with the pain and the rails (UPI, Razorpay) for affordable SaaS.

0 → 1

The incumbents are stuck

Naukri is a job board from 2006. LinkedIn is a social network that happens to have jobs. Neither will build an AI-native end-to-end workflow — it would cannibalise their existing business. The window is wide open.

What's actually live

Not a deck. Not a prototype. Already shipped.

Production-grade platform you can use today. Here's what is already wired up.

Built solo in 12 weeks
Zero external capital
From Bengaluru

9 production AI features

ATS scoring, JD-aware resume rewrite, job-fit explanations, AI mock interviews, salary coach, outreach drafts, and more — all live.

LangGraph orchestrator agent

Multi-tool agent with memory across the five phases. Not a chatbot wrapper — a real workflow engine.

42 API endpoints

Full Next.js app with custom JWT auth, onboarding, dashboard, kanban tracker, contact CRM, and AgentMail-backed inboxes.

Production data plane

Prisma + Postgres data model, Supabase for resume storage, Redis + BullMQ worker queues for async AI jobs.

Stripe + Razorpay billing

Dual payment rails so an Indian engineer pays in ₹ via UPI and an NRI pays in $ via card — zero friction either way.

WhatsApp + email channels

Twilio WhatsApp notifications for interview reminders and follow-up nudges. AgentMail for cold-outreach inboxes.

Actively shippingnext milestones
  • Browser-based auto-apply (Playwright) — automation layer in progress
  • Live job scraping from Indian job boards

Distribution > product right now. The product is built — we're shifting to growth.

Why ForgeAhead

One pipeline beats eight tabs.

Stop juggling spreadsheets, ChatGPT tabs, LinkedIn Premium, Naukri, and resume formatters. Here's what each one can't do that ForgeAhead does.

End-to-end pipeline (Strategy → Interview)

ForgeAheadUs
Yes
Spreadsheet + ChatGPT
No
LinkedIn Premium
Partial
Naukri
No

ATS resume scoring with rewrite

ForgeAheadUs
Yes
Spreadsheet + ChatGPT
manual
LinkedIn Premium
No
Naukri
No

AI mock interviews with feedback

ForgeAheadUs
Yes
Spreadsheet + ChatGPT
Partial
LinkedIn Premium
No
Naukri
No

Persistent context across phases

ForgeAheadUs
Yes
Spreadsheet + ChatGPT
No
LinkedIn Premium
No
Naukri
No

Job-fit scoring on every JD

ForgeAheadUs
Yes
Spreadsheet + ChatGPT
manual
LinkedIn Premium
No
Naukri
Partial

Drafted referral outreach

ForgeAheadUs
Yes
Spreadsheet + ChatGPT
manual
LinkedIn Premium
Partial
Naukri
No

Indian price (₹) + Razorpay/UPI

ForgeAheadUs
Yes
Spreadsheet + ChatGPT
LinkedIn Premium
No
Naukri
Yes

Salary negotiation coach

ForgeAheadUs
Yes
Spreadsheet + ChatGPT
No
LinkedIn Premium
No
Naukri
No

Stop paying for 4 tools that don't talk to each other.

Replace your stack

10 free applications/month · No credit card · Razorpay + Stripe checkout when you upgrade.

Pricing

Built for Indian price sensitivity.

Average search is 3–4 months. Pay monthly, or save with annual. ₹ via Razorpay/UPI, $ via Stripe.

Free

₹0/forever

Get the habit. See if the pipeline clicks for your search.

  • 10 applications / month
  • Basic resume scoring
  • Limited AI calls across phases
  • Personal kanban tracker
  • Strategy plan generator
Start free
Most popular

Hunter

₹499/month

For active searchers running a real campaign over 8–12 weeks.

  • Generous applications & rewrites
  • AI mock interviews
  • AI referral outreach drafts
  • AgentMail dedicated outreach inbox
  • Job-fit scoring on every JD
  • WhatsApp interview reminders
Go Hunter

Pay with UPI · Razorpay or Cards · Stripe

Placed

₹999/month

When you want the AI doing the heavy lifting end-to-end.

  • Unlimited AI across all 5 phases
  • Auto-apply queue (rolling out)
  • Salary negotiation coach
  • Priority support
  • Resume + LinkedIn audit
  • Everything in Hunter
Go Placed

Pay with UPI · Razorpay or Cards · Stripe

7-day no-questions refund on first paid month. Cancel any time from the billing page.

Founder

Girish Hiremath

Solo founder, Bengaluru

14+ years

Enterprise software across banking, pharma, fintech, RegTech, telecom, IoT

M.Tech DSAI

IIIT Dharwad — Deep Learning, NLP, Generative AI, RAG systems

Principal Engineer

Currently leading AI platform dev at a compliance & RegTech company

AI since 2012

Neural-net apps, IoT cloud agents — presented an AI Hindi reader at an intl. dev conference

Why I'm building this

I've been through the soul-crushing job search cycle multiple times across a 14-year career — the spreadsheets, the mass-applying, the cold outreach that goes nowhere. Every time I thought: there has to be a better way.

After years building enterprise platforms for Fortune 500 companies — top-4 US investment banks, life sciences, RegTech — and then going back to IIIT Dharwad for an M.Tech in Data Science & AI, I finally had the skills and the conviction to build the tool I always wished existed. I'm not guessing at the problem. I've lived it, repeatedly, across multiple industries and countries.

Why I can ship this alone, fast

Building a full-stack AI platform solo in 12 weeks isn't luck. It's the compound advantage of 14 years shipping enterprise systems, deep AI/ML training, and a personal obsession with this problem. The product is ahead of distribution. The next hire is growth, not engineering.

“The career services market is $31B and growing. Naukri won't build this. LinkedIn won't build this. The window is open — and I've already built the product.”
FAQ

The questions YC partners (and you) will ask.

Some users will — and that's fine. The pipeline persists for your next search 18–24 months later, which is the Indian tech reality. We're also building the Career OS layer (skill tracking, salary intel, interview history, contact graph) so ForgeAhead stays useful between active searches. You're not paying for a tool you'll abandon — you're keeping a career memory.

Private beta opening — Bengaluru first

Stop hunting jobs the 2006 way.

Five phases. One pipeline. AI with persistent memory across your entire search. Built for the way Indian engineers actually job-hunt.

No credit card. ₹ via Razorpay/UPI when you upgrade. Cancel anytime.