About Basanite

We are building the technical interview we wish had filtered us.

Basanite is an AI-native technical hiring platform. Every candidate gets a unique conversation built from their own CV, so leaked answers and AI cheating tools stop working. Hirers only spend their senior-engineer hours on candidates worth meeting.

Founded in 2026 in Manchester, UK, by three final-year computer scientists.

Our mission

Technical hiring has two breakdowns we want to solve. The first is that coding tests have collapsed into a cheating arms race — capable AI agents and screen overlays make take-homes and live-coding screens trivial to pass without exercising the underlying skill. The second is that the capability that does matter — engineering effectiveness when working alongside AI — is not measured anywhere.

Banning AI from the interview selects for unaided coding while leaving the AI-orchestration skill entirely untested. We do something different. We give every candidate a unique conversation built from their own CV, then put them in a real codebase alongside the AI tool of their choice and watch how they ship.

We do not believe AI should make the hiring decision. We believe AI should produce evidence — quote-grounded, auditable, fair — so the human interviewer can make a better one.

What we believe

Depth over breadth

Each layer of the assessment exists to move one level deeper into signal quality. A candidate who answers fluently at the surface should encounter ground that shifts beneath them at the next layer. The edges of real ability are blurry; performed ability has no edges.

Structure as fairness

By anchoring every evaluation to consistent frameworks and explicit scoring criteria, a self-taught engineer without institutional pedigree can be seen as clearly as one from a target university. Both are asked the same questions in the same spirit, with the same depth of follow-up.

Honest about AI limits

We flag where human expertise is required, produce quotable evidence rather than opaque scores, and position Basanite as infrastructure that makes human judgement better — not the mechanism that replaces it.

A two-way mirror

The best hiring processes leave candidates with a clearer understanding of themselves. Every assessment strategy deployed by Basanite can be honestly explained to the candidate it is applied to.

Story so far

Six weeks. Three pivots. Live product.

Early 2026
Problem identified
The three of us were applying for graduate engineering roles and watching technical screens collapse — leaked question banks, take-homes that could be done by Cursor in ten minutes, and a hiring funnel that no longer measured anything real.
April 2026
MVP shipped
End-to-end working product: hirer dashboard, candidate portal, live 10–20 minute AI voice interview, dual reports grounded in candidate quotes. Built in week one.
May 2026
50 trial users
University of Manchester CS students, Manchester technology recruiters, and early hirers running mock interviews. Surveyed feedback drove iteration two.
May 2026
Stripe VC accelerator
Accepted into the Stripe internal accelerator alongside ongoing applications to YC and VFA26.
May 2026
First paid pilot
Verbal commitment from Maxwell Bond — a seven-figure-revenue technology recruitment firm in Manchester. First contract worth ~£40k ARR.
2026 →
Iteration three
The AI Collaboration Workbench: a sandboxed VS Code environment where candidates ship a real ticket alongside the AI agent of their choice. The dimension no other interview measures.