Dayforce, the human capital management software company, has agreed to acquire Ribbon AI Inc., a Toronto startup whose AI conducts screening interviews with job candidates by voice and video. The deal was announced on October 23, 2026, from Minneapolis and Toronto.
Terms were not disclosed, and the companies did not say when the transaction is expected to close.
After closing, Ribbon's technology will be built natively into a new Dayforce Agentic Recruiting experience, according to the announcement.
What Ribbon built
Ribbon's voice AI holds two-way interviews with candidates at any hour. It generates interview questions and scoring rubrics from a job description and evaluates candidates from the interview transcript. The product also runs integrity checks that flag unusual audio, gaze and response-timing patterns, the announcement said.
Beyond interviews, Ribbon helps employers find candidates in their existing talent pools and contact them by SMS, WhatsApp and email. Dayforce said Ribbon was close to completing an AI scheduling agent.
Ribbon reports hundreds of customers and more than one million completed interviews, and it was named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in the enterprise category in 2026. Customers listed on Ribbon's website include Fuze HR, LAZ Parking, First Brands Group and Propel Impact.
“High-volume hiring shouldn't mean choosing between speed and a strong candidate experience.”
How employers use it
Ribbon is built to handle the first round of screening. A candidate talks to Ribbon's AI interviewer, and the employer receives an evaluation based on the interview transcript and scored against a rubric generated from the job description.
According to Unite.AI, Ribbon says about 90% of its customers run the product with its recommended default configuration rather than building custom interview flows. The company also generates questions from past interviews, not only from job descriptions, and its sourcing technology was tested against an applicant tracking system dataset of about 30 million records, the publication reported.
Ribbon's own site describes the product as "your applicant's favourite AI interviewer" and lists case studies with Stepful, Tactable, Teamtailor and Thrive.
The founders and the funding
Ribbon was founded in 2022 by chief executive Arsham Ghahramani and Dave Vu, BetaKit reported.
The company raised $8.2 million in early 2025 in a round led by Radical Ventures, the Toronto AI investor, according to BetaKit. Ribbon's own funding announcement from March 2025 also named Social Leverage, Cadenza Ventures and GD1 as participants.
In the deal announcement, Ghahramani said joining Dayforce would let Ribbon bring its conversational AI, interview intelligence, sourcing and outreach tools to more organisations.
Why Dayforce is buying
Dayforce sells payroll, HR and workforce management software and is headquartered in Toronto and Minneapolis. Founder and CEO David Ossip leads the company, which the private equity firm Thoma Bravo took private earlier in 2026 in a $12.3 billion deal, BetaKit reported.
Ossip framed the purchase around high-volume hiring, where employers screen large numbers of applicants for the same kinds of roles.
"High-volume hiring shouldn't mean choosing between speed and a strong candidate experience," Ossip said in the announcement.
"Ribbon accelerates our vision for agentic recruiting," he told BetaKit. Dayforce said Ribbon's technology would sit inside a new recruiting experience built around AI agents, rather than being sold as a separate tool.
Open questions
Dayforce did not say how Ribbon's integrity flags will be used in screening decisions. In its coverage, Unite.AI cautioned that signals such as unusual audio, gaze or response timing should not be confused with evidence of whether a candidate can do the job, and that keeping the two apart matters when a flag could affect someone's progress.
Unite.AI also noted that the customer and interview figures are reported by the company rather than independently measured, and that no general availability date for the combined product has been announced.
The companies did not say whether Ribbon will keep selling to employers that do not use Dayforce, or how many Ribbon employees will join Dayforce.
