Human curated highlights from last week:
Sipping more human-in-the-loop: Juicebox announces agreement to acquire Fetcher assets;
Offering fillmore to all: Metaview raises $60m to put AI agents across the whole hiring process;
Finding a more realistic market: North America’s startup funding falls in Q3 as AI giants refocus;
Vacuuming up artificial mindlessness: LinkedIn exec offers insight into the battle against AI slop;
Tripping over the same-o, same-o: Nearly half abandon applications due to tedious processes.
Plus...
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Juicebox Announces Agreement to Acquire Fetcher Assets
Juicebox, the AI recruiting platform, today announced a strategic agreement to acquire intellectual property and other assets from Fetcher, a talent sourcing and recruiting automation platform. As part of the agreement, Fetcher customers will have the option to transition to Juicebox as Fetcher winds down its existing product and operations.
Metaview raises $60m to put AI agents across the whole hiring process
Metaview, a London and San Francisco startup that builds AI agents for recruiting, has raised a $60m Series C led by Insight Partners. GV, Intrepid Growth Partners, Seedcamp, Vertex Ventures US, Plural and Garuda Ventures also took part, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. The round comes a year after its previous one and brings its total funding to $110m.
North America’s Startup Funding Falls In Q3 As AI Giants Eye The Public Markets
Funding to North American startups declined sequentially in the third quarter and came in well below the all-time peak. However, the dip is largely due to the absence of new megarounds for OpenAI and Anthropic and doesn’t appear to reflect any broad weakening in the venture investment climate. In total, investors poured $92 billion into seed- through growth-stage rounds for U.S. and Canadian startups in the third quarter, per Crunchbase data. That’s a 35% decline from the prior quarter but up 50% from year-ago levels. Deal volume held fairly steady, with late-stage and early-stage round counts remaining close to prior quarter levels.
LinkedIn exec offers insight into the battle against AI slop
LinkedIn has shared some new insight into its evolving battle against AI slop, as the platform works to stem the flood of repetitive artificial intelligence-generated content that’s steadily eroding its in-app experience. In August, LinkedIn added a new option that let users report instances of suspected AI-generated content in-stream. More specifically, this feature targeted AI slop, which LinkedIn defines as generic and/or repetitive posts that added no real insight.
Nearly half abandon applications due to tedious processes
Tedious or time-consuming job applications caused nearly half of job seekers, 46%, to abandon an application midstream, with Gen Z and millennials more likely to do so, according to Indeed’s State of the Job Seeker 2026 report. Active job seekers more often abandoned applications, 63%, than did those who described themselves as passive at 40%, according to the survey of 1,501 job seekers. Passive job seekers are defined as those who aren’t actively looking but occasionally browse listings or consider an opportunity if it arises.
