Axira AI is the screening and certification agent on FoundersAreHiring, a hiring platform for startups. Instead of a form or a resume filter, candidates have a short voice conversation with an AI interviewer. Axira listens to how they answer, not only what they say, and turns that into a scorecard for founders and a verifiable certificate for the candidate.
Lightrains built Axira as a voice AI agent: text-to-speech for the questions, speech-to-text for the answers, and sentiment and tone analysis on top of the transcript.
The problem
A resume shows where someone has worked, not how they think. For a founder hiring the first 10 to 30 people, that gap is expensive: every first-round call takes founder time, and scheduling those calls slows the whole pipeline.
Early teams also hire for roles that need judgment more than keywords, such as engineering leads, product managers and growth hires. Keyword filters and typed questionnaires flatten those candidates into the same few phrases.
FoundersAreHiring wanted a first round that started with signal instead of a resume, and that respected the candidate’s time as much as the founder’s. Voice was the answer: people explain decisions more honestly out loud than in a polished written response.
Voice mode: a conversation, not a form
The whole screening runs in voice mode. Axira asks three to five targeted, founder-style questions about past decisions and experience, and the candidate answers out loud.
- Asynchronous. There is no call to book. The candidate starts when it suits them.
- Paced by the candidate. They can pause between questions and pick up again.
- No typing. The candidate never fills in a text box, so the answer reflects how they think on their feet.
The voice pipeline
Each question and answer passes through the same pipeline:
- Text-to-speech. Axira reads each question aloud in a natural AI voice, so the screening feels like a conversation with an interviewer rather than a quiz.
- Speech-to-text. The candidate’s spoken answer is transcribed. The transcript is what the scoring works from, and what a founder can read later.
- Sentiment and tone analysis. Axira looks past the words at how the answer was delivered: clarity, pace, confidence and sentiment. Two candidates with similar transcripts can come across very differently, and this is where that shows up.
- Trait scoring. The transcript and tone signals are scored against the traits founders care about, and summarized in plain language.
What founders see
Every completed screening produces a structured scorecard with a 1 to 5 rating across four traits, plus written feedback:
- Personality fit: clarity and pace of communication
- Expertise signals: depth in the candidate’s field
- Exposure level: the range of situations they have worked through
- Founder-ready traits: bias for action and decision-making
The summary helps the founder decide who to contact. Axira is a first-layer filter, not a replacement for interviews, and it does not reject candidates on its own.
Axira also learns from outcomes. After a hire, founder feedback tunes future match scoring to that team’s leadership style.
The Founder-Ready certificate
Candidates who pass get a Founder-Ready Certified digital certificate. It turns a screening into something the candidate keeps and reuses, instead of an assessment that disappears into one company’s applicant tracking system.
The certificate shows:
- The candidate’s name, with “Certified by Axira AI” and the date it was verified
- Their scores across the assessed traits
- An overall impression written from the screening
It is built to be trusted by someone who has never used the platform:
- Tamper-proof. Each certificate carries embedded cryptographic metadata, so an edited copy fails verification.
- Verifiable by QR. A QR code on the certificate links to the candidate’s scorecard, where a founder can confirm it is genuine.
- Time-stamped. Every badge records when it was issued.
Candidates control where it goes. Scorecards are private by default. A candidate can share the certificate on LinkedIn, in a resume or in an email signature, and it is attached to their job applications on FoundersAreHiring automatically. They can retake the screening for free after a 30-day cooldown, or sooner if a founder invites them.
Built into the hiring platform
Axira runs inside FoundersAreHiring rather than as a separate tool. Founders send screening invites from the platform, and results sit alongside the rest of the candidate’s profile. The screening is free for candidates.
Who it is for
- Founders hiring their first 10 to 30 employees
- Teams hiring for roles that need founder-level judgment, such as engineering leads, PMs and growth
- Remote and distributed teams
- Founders who do not have a recruiting team