Merra AI has launched its conversational AI screening platform that automates first-round interviews and guarantees constructive feedback for every rejected applicant.
Merra AI, founded in 2025 and backed by the University of Warwick’s startup programme, enables talent acquisition teams to replace manual phone screening and traditional video interviews with a two-way conversational AI interview that operates around the clock.
It aims to make high-volume hiring more efficient and ensure candidates get a fair and timely experience. The start-up argues that recruiters often rely on rigid ATS filters or slow manual reviews, which can reject qualified applicants and cause delays.
The tool integrates into existing hiring workflows and adapts in real time, asks follow-up questions, producing shortlists ranked by a 0–100 ‘Match Fit’ score along with evaluation summaries, transcripts and recordings for hiring managers. Merra also highlights candidate wellbeing as a key feature, requiring that every rejected applicant receive constructive feedback.
Merra AI says it uses ‘human-centric conversational AI’ to assess soft skills, behaviour and competency. It evaluates candidates based only on their answers, tone and skills and not on their appearance or background.
Merra AI screened over 800 engineering applicants as part of a high-volume trial and reduced total screening time by 60%. The start-up also built a new engineering system, led by CTO Samuel Steven Prisma, to ensure every candidate receives the same thorough and consistent interview.
Merra AI founder and CEO Ahmed Ghelle says: “Ghosting isn’t intentional; it’s a maths problem. No recruiter can speak to hundreds of applicants. Merra gives every candidate a fair hearing and meaningful feedback, while giving talent teams their time back to focus on later stages and final decisions.”
Merra AI chief AI officer Mazka Buana Hidayat says: “We didn’t just want to build a faster filter. We wanted to build a fairer one. Conversational AI captures nuance and soft skills that a CV simply can’t, allowing candidates to be judged on their potential, not formatting or keyword matching.”
Prisma says: “The volume challenge is global. We built Merra so every applicant, regardless of volume or geography, receives a consistent, in-depth interview that ensures fairness, removes bias and evaluates real ability rather than screening them out based on their CV.”
