Handshake

Handshake is a San Francisco-based career network that connects college students and early-career job seekers with employers, and has more recently expanded into AI model training. Founded in 2014 by Michigan Technological University students Garrett Lord, Ben Christensen and Scott Ringwelski, the platform grew out of a simple observation: elite recruiters concentrated their campus visits at a small number of schools, leaving students elsewhere without access. Handshake instead partnered directly with colleges and career centers, building a network that today spans more than 1,600 educational institutions and roughly 25 million students and young professionals, connected to hundreds of thousands of employers including the Fortune 500.

The company raised seven venture rounds between 2015 and 2022, taking in a combined $434 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Spark Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, True Ventures, EQT Ventures, GGV Capital, Coatue Management and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Its January 2022 Series F, a $200 million round led by Coatue Management and Valiant Peregrine Fund, valued the company at $3.5 billion, more than double its valuation from the year before.

In January 2025 Handshake launched a new division, Handshake AI, that turns its network of students and domain experts into a paid workforce for labeling and evaluating training data for frontier AI labs. The business reached $100 million in annualized revenue within eight months and grew Handshake's combined run rate toward roughly $1 billion in gross annualized revenue by April 2026, prompting Handshake to acquire the data-quality startup Cleanlab in January 2026 to strengthen its research capabilities. In October 2025 CEO Garrett Lord described the shift as a company "re-founding," eliminating roughly 100 roles, about 15% of the U.S. team, from its traditional recruiting business to concentrate resources on AI.

Handshake has continued to expand around this AI pivot: it acquired the AI-native corporate learning platform Uplimit in June 2026, adding Uplimit co-founder and CEO Julia Stiglitz to its executive team as Chief Education & Workforce Officer, with the stated goal of building a free "skills studio" that ties AI-driven learning to career paths inside Handshake's core early-career platform.