EV Charging Company Doubles Job Posts, State of Pre-seed Investing, and more

Welcome to the startup spotter! Christmas might be over, but we still have some gifts of early startup news waiting for you under the tree 🎄

In this week's spotter:

• EV-charging company on a hiring spree

• The state of pre-seed investing 🔮

• Recruiter hire at static code analyzer company

EV Charging is Big $$$

Veloce Energy builds infrastructure to make it easier and cheaper to install electric vehicle (EV) charging stations.

When you're on the road and you stop to charge your Tesla (not us, we still drive a '93 Corolla 🚙), there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that makes it work.

And with 40-50% of US vehicles slated to be electric by 2030, we're going to need EV charging stations to be nearly as prevalent as gas stations.

That's going to take a lot of money; according to the International Council on Clean Transportation, there will be over $4 billion spent per year on charging infrastructure by 2030 in the US alone (a 4x increase over 2021):

And just like gas in gas stations, electricity needs to be stored at charging stations, as well as distributed throughout charging stations to the vehicles in need of that sweet, sweet electricity.

That's where Veloce Energy comes in.

They sell a modular, rugged battery system that is suitable for EV charging stations. Plus they sell a system of getting that electricity to charging ports that is entirely above ground; below-ground systems are more costly and complicated to install, but Veloce has created a super-effective and not-super-ugly above ground solution:

See, it's not bad!

So they're in a growing market with an interesting solution, they raised $3.5mm about 8 months ago...and their open job posts are just now spiking:

November 26: 6 jobsDecember 18: 11 jobs

This might seem like a tiny increase, but it's really not; for a small company, almost doubling your open job posts in 15 business days means you're serious about hiring.

And if you're serious about hiring, then you're either fundraising or business is rocking.

On top of that, Veloce's open jobs include two sales directors and a business development manager: really growth oriented positions.

It looks like Veloce is in a great position; their CEO is Jeff Wolfe, contact him if you'd like to learn more.

Note: we've started a spreadsheet to track startups with big job post spikes, check it out here. P.S. yes, we shamelessly included a link to our site in the sheet, please share it.

State of Pre-seed Investing

We really enjoyed this twitter thread from Will Bricker of Hustle Fund about what's going on in the pre-seed startup world:

To summarize:

• he looked at 3,000 startups that applied to Hustle Fund for pre-seed investment

• median valuation is $5.5mm, down from a 2022 peak of $6.5mm

• valuation decrease is mostly for pre-MVP/pre-revenue companies

• volume of deals has not decreased

So investors can expect to be getting slightly more favorable valuations, and feel free to be harder on companies with no product or revenue (as you probably should have been in 2021 as well....)

deepsource.io Is About to Hire

deepsource.io makes software to help make your software better. Or in more official terms, they make a custom static code analysis platform 🤓.

If you're not familiar with static code analysis, it's kind of like spellcheck for programmers. If something is wrong with your code, a static analyzer catches it before your customers run the bad code and get an error, like the ol' blue screen of death:

There are a ton of static analyzers out there, and deepsource is one, but it looks like things might be going well for deepsource.

Though they haven't seen a spike in job posts, they did just post an open job for a Senior Recruiter. This is typically a really good leading indicator; if a company is hiring a recruiter, that means they're likely to be doing a lot of hiring in the future.

They last fundraised $5mm about 1 year ago, so the fact that they're hiring a recruiter now means they haven't cratered in the past 12 months, which is a great sign!

Their CEO is Sanket Saurav if you'd like to learn more.

Another note: the spreadsheet also tracks startups who are hiring recruiters, check it out here.

And That's It!

Hope you enjoyed this week. btw, in the past week, premium subscribers also got to see:

• A pre-seed travel payments startup that tripled open job posts

• An edtech company that doubled open job posts

• A platform for helping creators crowdfund that posted a recruiter role

• A space travel company that doubled job posts (and it ain't SpaceX!)

And more! Fill out the form here if you're interested in premium, early subscribers get 50% off for life.

Until next week,

-startup spotter