Dan Jones -
EO & Co-Founder of Calyptus
Five years on the other side of the table.
Before Calyptus, Dan spent five years in deeptech venture capital, sitting across the table from thousands of founders building companies in AI, robotics, climate, and frontier tech. It was an education in everything he would eventually need: strategy, finance, how competitive edge actually gets built, what a real moat looks like, and why some companies pull away from the pack while others stall.
In almost every conversation with 100s of founders, one thing kept surfacing as the real blocker: hiring
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Solving the hiring problem.
Spending that much time listening to builders leaves a mark. Dan didn't want to be the person writing the cheques. He wanted to be the one building. And the problem he'd heard about most, for years, was the one he wanted to solve.
That's how the Dan Jones Calyptus story begins. A decision to go and fix the thing every founder around him had been struggling with first-hand.
Why Calyptus started as an agency.
From day one, the plan was a platform. Dan always wanted to build software that would change how hiring works. But he was determined not to repeat the mistake he'd watched so many tech-led attempts make: trying to build another tool without truly understand the depths of recruitment.
Calyptus began as a hands-on recruitment agency in the Web3 space . An industry he and Callum were passionate about with a huge problem: 18,000 developers sustaining a $3 trillion market.
Fully human, pay-per-hire, in the weeds. The point wasn't the revenue (though that was welcome). The point was learning. Every manual process. Every friction point. Every reason the current system makes everyone miserable.
You can't design the fix until you've lived the problem.
Three platforms built. One that clicked.
Dan and his co-founder Callum have built the Calyptus platform three times. V1 was a scrappy MVP that taught them what wouldn't work. V2 was the opposite problem: over-built, too opinionated, solving the wrong things. V3 is the version that finally clicked, and what made it click was one reframe. Stop trying to replace recruiters. Start making them dramatically better.
That single insight is the thesis the whole business now runs on. Hiring great people is, and should stay, a human thing. AI doesn't need to do the talking. AI needs to do everything else.
Human experience at AI speed.
This is the idea Dan cares about most, and it's the line he draws through everything Calyptus builds.
Traditional recruiters spend roughly 80% of their time sourcing and about 20% actually speaking to people. At Calyptus that model is flipped. The AI handles sourcing across billions of global profiles. Calyptus’ recruiters spend 80% of their time on the calls that actually matter: having real conversations with top candidates. For inbound applications to their clients roles, an AI interviewer (called Alex) handles the first conversation so nothing stalls and no great candidate gets lost in a queue.
Simple idea. Big result. Give the human work to humans. Give the volume work to AI. Run both at once. You end up with the thing everyone says they want but almost nobody has actually built: a hiring experience that feels human, running at the speed of software.
Where things stand today.
Dan runs Calyptus with his co-founder Callum Crombie, who brings a decade of HRtech experience .The team is small with 15 members, deliberately lean, and bootstrapped, obsessively focused on one thing: helping candidates find the perfect job and no longer being lost as a CV amongst 1000s of others.
If you're a founder, HR leader or manager, needing a plug-and-play talent team, Calyptus is built for you. You can reach Dan directly on LinkedIn, or start a conversation at info@calyptus.co.
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Five years listening to founders & candidates describe their hiring problems, five more years building the thing that would actually fix it.
