IoT company growing 500%, OpenAI hires Recruiters, and more

Welcome to the startup spotter newsletter, where we went 88mph in the DeLorean to bring you startup news from the future 🔥🔥

In this week's spotter:

• IoT company increases job posts 500%

• chatGPT is good for business

• 3 early stage startups hire recruiters

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Now let's get down to business.

Huge Spike in Memfault Job Posts

Remember the Pebble Time? One of the early smartwatches, it was one of the most successful kickstarters ever, raising over $20M in 2015; uhh, that's a lot of scratch.

The watch was loved by its hardcore users, but the business ultimately didn't work; it was sold for parts to Fitbit.

But just because the business didn't work (Apple and other bigcos ate their lunch), doesn't mean they didn't have good tech.

3 former Pebble engineers took their lessons learned and started Memfault.

Memfault is kind of like Datadog for IoT. At Pebble, they had trouble debugging hardware issues with users' watches, so they set out to solve this problem with Memfault.

They monitor your smart devices for errors, connectivity, and overall help you keep huge fleets of devices properly functioning.

And most importantly, business appears to have picked up enormously in the past 3 weeks.

We record open job posts for tens of thousands of startups, including Memfault. Open job posts can be a great indicator of the current state of a company, especially early stage startups.

Take a look at this chart of Memfault's open job posts over time:

November 26: 3 open jobsDecember 13: 15 open jobs

That is a 500% increase in 12 business days! 📈

The open job posts are all sales (3 VPs of Sales, 3 Account Executives) and engineering. We love to see that; that amount of sales hiring indicates they think they have a ton of growth available, and engineering hires mean they have enough money to support long term R&D.

Memfault has raised $11.2 million to date, including an $8.5 million Series A in April 2021. They might be fundraising again now, or they're just in a comfortable business position where they can hire.

Get in touch with their CEO François Baldassari to see about fundraising or other inquiries.

OpenAI Poised for Continued Growth

Unless you've been at a silent retreat the past 3 weeks, you've heard about chatGPT, OpenAI's online chat friend:

Everyone on the internet has been using it, and even though it's surely costing OpenAI a fortune in Azure fees, it's likely delivered a positive ROI based on the fact that it has dominated social media for weeks.

This means continued growth for the company. In fact, they just posted 3 new recruiter job openings in the past week alone (giving them a total of 6 open recruiter roles).

Their LinkedIn profile currently shows 478 employees, so adding 6 recruiters on top of their existing recruiting team means they are growing a ton.

And we think they have their college essay writing friend to thank for it:

Job Posts for Recruiters at 2 Startups

Speaking of recruiters, some early stage startups are hiring recruiters as well.

Why do we care?

When a small company hires a recruiter, that's likely a positive indicator. If you're hiring a recruiter, that means you're looking to scale your hiring significantly, and you're looking to scale your hiring if business is going well or your next round is looking pretty solid.

So we closely track which early stage companies are hiring recruiters, and here are 2 we saw this week:

• Neurons: Uses AI to tell you how good your ads and marketing are. Raised a $6M seed round in August.

• BioRender: Online scientific figure maker. No significant announced fundraising outside of YC.

Any early stage startup hiring a recruiter is one to watch, so keep an eye on these in particular.

Psst...

We're working on a premium offering.

This week, 4 more startups besides Memfault saw huge job spikes.

And 3 more early stage startups are also hiring recruiters.

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That's a Wrap

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-startup spotter