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In this week’s spotter:

• The Startup Jobs Index

• Friend of the spotter

• Fraud detection company increases jobs 7x

• Carbon removal = $

Introducing the Startup Jobs Index

Whoa, what’s that shiny new graphic above?

Why, it’s a new startup spotter newsletter feature!

Say hello to the “Startup Jobs Index” or SJI as we’ll be calling it for short.

The SJI tracks the average number of open job posts at Y Combinator startups from the 2015 through 2021 batches.

Why only YC startups? They’re a large, natural group of startups that somewhat represent the startup ecosystem.

Trends observed in YC companies are likely to be present across a variety of startups.

And we excluded 2022 and 2023 since they might not be doing as much hiring quite yet.

Some caveats for the data nerds:

• We automate crawling of job posts, so not every company is included for a variety of reasons, e.g. they only include their posts on LinkedIn which we can’t crawl.

• We’re using mean and not median because the median is very slow to move. Though the average can be moved by a small number of large companies, it still provides a much better leading indicator than the median.

OK, nerd stuff done.

So the SJI right now is 2.28, which means the average YC company has 2.28 open jobs listed (FYI, companies with 0 jobs posted are included in the calculation).

This number is down 36.5% from 12 months ago (whoa), and even down 1.9% from 1 month ago.

Obviously startups are still living in a very different world from early 2022; the SJI will help us quantitatively see it as it recovers or declines further.

You’ll always get the latest SJI at the top of every edition of the spotter 🙌

Like it? Hate it? Reply, let us know what you think!

The Future of Health Startups

Check out this great podcast + newsletter combo called Founders Keepers.

The pod features interviews with incredible healthcare startup founders.

For example, their latest episode was with the Co-founder/CEO of Codagenix, a startup that is creating a new generation of vaccines to fight infectious disease and cancer.

Just slightly more important than your run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley cat picture sharing startup 🙀

If you have any interest at all in healthtech, you should check out Founders Keepers; it’s the best way to learn about new startups changing healthcare.

You can find their podcast here, or click below to subscribe to their newsletter:

(Not an ad, btw, they’re just friends of ours doing good work. Check them out!)

Watch Out, Fraudsters

Picture this.

You’re a professional money launderer; you help the bad guys make their dirty money look like it was earned legit.

(You’re like Marty Byrde from Ozark, if that helps).

You’re moving money between bank accounts like you always do, making a criminal transaction look like a real one.

But this time….your transaction is denied.

The next day, the FBI shows up.

Game over.

And it all started with a company that was able to flag your transaction as fraudulent.

And that company is a relatively new startup called Flagright.

Flagright helps fintech companies identify bad guys moving money around, whether it’s for money laundering or other fraudulent purposes.

In fact, financial companies are required to comply with anti-money laundering, or “AML", laws.

Flagright offers no-code tools as well as an API to analyze financial transactions for fraudulent behavior and help companies comply with these laws.

We’ve written about compliance companies before; the bottom line is compliance is a great business to be in. The need never goes away, so you have customers for life.

And the cost of compliance is often fairly high; with plans starting at $24k/year, Flagright has high-dollar customers who are going to be around forever 💰💰

On top of all that, Flagright has one of the most beautiful open job post chart patterns that we see here at startup spotter:

• February 19: 1 open job

• March 7: 7 open jobs (!)

Flagright 7x’ed their open job posts in just a few weeks, after only having 1 open job for months.

Adding that many open job posts in such a short time is an extremely positive indicator that they are fundraising again now.

Flagright last raised a $3.2 million seed round in June 2022, so they’re looking due for a new round soon.

Their CEO is Baran Özkan; contact him for more information and see if you can squeeze into their very-likely Series A.

Like every company we highlight, Flagright is in our dealflow spreadsheet which you can check out here.

Carbon Removal, So Hot Right Now

Last year, climatetech represented as much as 30% of all VC investment.

This next company didn’t raise last year, but they just nearly doubled their open job posts, so we’re thinking they will soon.

Plus they’re a little crazy, and we like a little crazy.

Meet Remora Carbon.

Lots of companies are working on ways to remove CO₂ pollution from our air.

But instead of waiting for CO₂ to make its way into the atmosphere, Remora captures it directly from the exhaust of semi-trucks 🚛

Seriously, they install empty tanks onto trucks, and their system filters out the dirty CO₂ and stores it in the tanks so it never gets into the air.

See, it’s a little crazy, right??

You might be thinking there’s no way this can work: “This system must absolutely kill fuel efficiency,” I can hear you saying to yourself now.

But here’s the thing: the stored CO₂ is later sold for a profit! And that profit is greater than the lost fuel efficiency.

So the environment wins, the trucking companies win, and Remora wins; sounds pretty great.

On top of being a really cool business, Remora just nearly doubled their open job posts:

• February 17: 10 open jobs

• March 8: 17 open jobs

And one of those open jobs was for a “Talent Acquisition Manager”, which is fancy-talk for a Senior Recruiter.

We love seeing Recruiter hires; that means a company is planning to really grow.

Remora last raised their $5.5 million seed round in October 2021, but another round is coming soon.

Contact their CEO Paul Gross for more information.

(psst, Remora is in our startup spreadsheet, too)

Smile Because It Happened

That’s it for this week’s edition, we hope you enjoyed it.

One more thing.

Do you need help collecting startup/company data?

Maybe to help identify startups to invest in, or maybe for lead generation?

You’ve seen what we can do.

Let us help.

Work with us! We can collect data from a wide variety of sources to give you an edge.

Just fill out the form here and we can talk to you about what we can do.

‘Til next week,
startup spotter