Case studies

Real searches, and what came back

Every one is the same motion: someone described the person they needed in a sentence, and xhuman went and found them. What changes is who is asking and what turns on the answer. Each is set out the way the work happened — the situation, the prompt as it was typed, what the results were checked against, and what came of it.

Names, companies, sectors and figures are anonymised. Each study describes the workflow and the persona rather than the customer.

Venture capitalSeed fund, industrial thesisHow a seed fund found robotics founders before the round existedTwelve technical founders in a thesis the fund had no deal flow in — none of them in its CRM.

Investment bankingBoutique sell-side M&AHow a sell-side banker found nine buyers that were on no listAdjacent strategics and family-owned groups, found by who runs their deals rather than by sector code.

Private equityMid-market, proprietary originationHow a mid-market fund found founder-owned targets nobody had calledSixty-one owner-operators in the Nordics with no institutional capital on the cap table.

Private equityCommercial diligence, live dealHow a diligence team found four operators who had run the exact playbookNot category-adjacent experts — people who had personally managed the same co-packer transition.

Executive searchBoutique firm, engineering mandateHow a search consultant found engineers who had done the exact migrationTwenty-three staff engineers who had scaled a payments platform past a specific threshold — sixteen new to the firm's ATS.

FounderSeed-stage, raising a Series AHow a founder found the investors who had already backed the thesisPartners who personally led a round in the category — not every fund with the word on its website.

FounderSeed-stage, first ten customersHow a founder found the buyers who owned the budget, not the problemA hiring signal turned out to separate companies that would buy from companies that agreed.