Handshake signals growth — plus a big lease

Handshake just made two very old-school signals at once: its chief executive officer is telling the market the company now helps supply expert data for artificial intelligence training, and the company also renewed 83,000 square feet at 225 Bush Street in San Francisco. Those two moves point in the same direction: Handshake wants to look less like a college job board and more like a scaled infrastructure company with a permanent home base. (joinhandshake.com) (news.theregistrysf.com) Handshake started in 2014 as a recruiting network for students and recent graduates, and it spent a decade building relationships with universities and employers. On its current company page, Handshake says it now connects 20 million knowledge workers, more than 1,600 educational institutions, and 1 million employers. (joinhandshake.com) That network is the key to the new pitch. In March 2025, Handshake AI said it had launched an artificial intelligence talent marketplace and human data business that connects experts from its network directly with leading artificial intelligence labs for model training, evaluation, and alignment. (joinhandshake.com) The company has been filling in that story with acquisitions. Handshake said it acquired Cleanlab to deepen work in evaluations, data quality, and reinforcement learning environments, and then acquired Taro, a software engineer community with more than 175,000 engineers from over 300 technology companies. (joinhandshake.com 1) (joinhandshake.com 2) Garrett Lord’s public message is that the useful fuel for newer models is no longer just scraped internet text. Handshake’s own materials now describe the company as “the career network for the artificial intelligence economy,” built around verified experience, skill signals, and project work instead of static résumés. (joinhandshake.com 1) (joinhandshake.com 2) The lease matters because San Francisco offices are still not an easy bet. CBRE said the city’s office vacancy rate was 30.4% in the first quarter of 2026, even after net absorption turned positive, so an 83,000-square-foot renewal is still a noticeable commitment. (cbre.com) The address matters too. The Registry reported that Handshake renewed at 225 Bush Street, a roughly 560,000-square-foot Financial District tower whose owner had already defaulted on a $350 million loan, so keeping a large tenant in place helps stabilize a building under financial stress. (news.theregistrysf.com 1) (news.theregistrysf.com 2) Handshake is also telling employees and customers that this is not a side project. In its recent “refounding” post, the company said it is redeploying capital, focus, and team toward becoming “the destination for careers in the AI economy,” and it said artificial intelligence startups on Handshake are hiring 83% more early talent this year than last year. (joinhandshake.com) Put together, the picture is pretty clear. Handshake is trying to turn a university recruiting network into a two-sided business that sells access to jobs on one side and access to verified expert labor for model building on the other, while the lease renewal says the company expects to be large enough to need 83,000 square feet in downtown San Francisco while it does it. (joinhandshake.com) (joinhandshake.com) (news.theregistrysf.com)