Maki People

Company overview

Maki (Maki SAS) is a Paris, France-based AI hiring company founded in 2021 by Maxime Legardez, Paul-Louis Caylar, and Benjamin Chino. Its core product is a science-backed pre-hire assessment and screening platform spanning hundreds of skills, voice screening in 45+ languages, and behavioral/situational evaluations, now wrapped in conversational AI agents that also cover interview support and candidate self-scheduling. The company raised a ~€27.8M Series A (led by Blossom Capital) in early 2025, reports rapid enterprise growth, and counts Fortune 2000 clients such as H&M, BNP Paribas, Capgemini, PwC and Deloitte. Pricing is credit-based with custom enterprise quotes, placing it firmly in the enterprise tier.

Regulatory exposure

Maki has heavy exposure to all major AI-hiring regimes. As an assessment/screening tool that scores candidates, it is an EU AI Act Annex III high-risk system, and its Paris HQ plus large EU client base put it squarely under EU jurisdiction; it also markets to US employers, triggering NYC Local Law 144 AEDT bias-audit duties and emerging Illinois/Colorado obligations. Maki backs its 'EU AI Act alignment' and 'NYC Local Law 144 bias-audited assessments' claims with two publicly viewable, independent 2026 Holistic AI LL 144 audits — for its Shiro assessment engine and its Mochi voice-screening tool — each disclosing the AEDT description, methodology, and full impact-ratio tables, alongside ongoing DIF and Adverse Impact (80% rule) testing. Documentation depth still trails the strongest peers: it holds no ISO 42001, publishes no full Annex IV technical pack or model card, and much of its Trust Center (Instructions for Use, the DPIA summary, the AI governance policy) is available to customers on request rather than openly downloadable. Its privacy policy also disclaims GDPR Article 22 automated decision-making — a framing tension for a high-risk scoring tool.

Path to a higher score

With independent LL 144 audits and a populated Vanta trust center now in place, the remaining gains are about depth and openness rather than existence. The highest-leverage moves: pursue ISO 42001 and/or a SOC 2 report; publish a full Annex IV-aligned technical pack or model card rather than gating it; keep the bias audits on a named, recurring cadence and complement synthetic-data testing with live applicant-flow results; and add a public status page and model-update changelog for post-market monitoring. Un-gating the deployer-facing EU AI Act materials — Instructions for Use, the DPIA/FRIA summary, and an explicit Article 27 deployer guide — plus offering a self-service DPA would lift the FRIA, customer-documentation, and data-governance scores that a request-only posture currently caps. Documenting concrete in-product override and audit-log controls, rather than generic 'recruiters stay in the loop' language, remains the clearest path to a higher human-oversight score.