Two readings of the same company. Institutions ask what this becomes in ten years; individuals ask how it makes money by next quarter. Both answers are below, with their sources.
Roughly 65 million people are hired in the United States each year (BLS JOLTS, September 2026: 5.4M hires a month). Globally, 186 million people are unemployed (ILO, 2026 projection), and about half of workers in Europe and Australia plan to look for a new job in 2026. The search is the most consequential project of a person's year, and it runs on spreadsheets, memory and anxiety because the information lives in other people's systems.
Cairn is the system of record for the individual's career search: the place where every application, conversation, interview, offer and market signal is reconciled into one evidence-backed ledger, kept current without effort, and queried in plain language. Owning that record is the position from which everything else in the category — matching, coaching, employer transparency, outplacement, internal mobility — becomes a feature rather than a company.
Each connected source — email, portal, calendar, text, the member's own LinkedIn export and, later, the employer's ATS — makes the ledger more complete. Months of evidence-backed history, contacts, follow-ups and outcomes are not reproducible by a résumé tool.
Nineteen ATS vendors plus LinkedIn and Indeed, each with tenant-specific wording. Today a member's corrections are stored and applied to that member's own record. Using confirmed classifications to improve the shared rules for every user is planned and not built yet. Deterministic rules resolve most of the traffic, which keeps model spend low.
The same ledger serves candidates and employers: verified status, re-engagement of finalists, outplacement, internal mobility. Employers pay for recruiter capacity and brand; candidates pay for certainty; institutions pay for outcomes. No side's data is sold to another.
Row-level isolation in the database, envelope-encrypted credentials, consent records for every channel, models that never see secrets, a SOC 2 control set from day one. In a category with 1.7-star auto-appliers, trust is the brand.
Base case turns a monthly operating profit from month 26 (cash breakeven month 35) with $1.41M peak cash need; the round is sized to carry the downside case through month 36.
The data room holds the financial model (three scenarios), the research memos behind every figure above, the SOC 2 control matrix and the risk register. Neither track uses slogans; investors are shown the numbers, their sources and the assumptions, and the product is shown doing the work.