Vector Search, Money in Employee Engagement, and All-Electric Jet Engines

Hey startup spotters! We’re here to do 2 things: kick some ass and tell you about cool startups, and…well, we are not out of cool startups, so we’ll just tell you about those.

Not yet subscribed? Hit the button below to get all of our startup data delivered to your inbox every week.

In this week’s spotter:

• One more victory lap

• A company that helps supercharge search

• Employee engagement = $$$

• All-electric jet engines

Another Victory Lap

Before startup spotter had an email newsletter (the “before times”), we highlighted a crypto company called Coincover on our twitter feed:

Coincover provides a much needed service in crypto: fraud prevention.

We posted the above tweet on September 29, 2022 when we saw Coincover more than triple their open job posts last summer:

• August 16, 2022: 6 open jobs

• September 24, 2022: 20 open jobs

And what did we see on February 9, 2023, 5 months later?

A fundraising announcement our readers knew about almost half a year sooner!

So keep on reading and tell your friends: you really can learn about startup fundraises months before anyone else knows about them from startup spotter.

What’s Our Vector, Victor?

If you’ve been following AI and LLM developments closely, you might have heard of pinecone.io (or maybe you haven’t, I’m not a mind reader).

pinecone lets companies easily add “vector search” to their products.

What is “vector search”, you ask? Nerd time 🤓

Imagine you run an e-commerce site for skincare products, and you have a product on your website called “Face Moisturizer”.

Now let’s say a user searches your site for “Skin Cream”.

They get 0 results since your product description didn’t include the words “skin” or “cream” 😢

But "vector search” measures the closeness of words to each other by converting every word to a number and applying a little bit of smarts.

A vector search database might say that “moisturizer” is 3.428 and “cream” is 3.321, so it knows that “cream” and “moisturizer” are actually very similar to each other.

So if your site were using vector search like pinecone provides, the user would see your face moisturizer product in the results and maybe you’ll get a sweet, sweet sale 💰

pinecone has been popular among the AI crowd recently, but we have an additional data point: on February 6, they posted an open job for a Technical Recruiter.

When a company is hiring a recruiter, that is a great signal. That means they’re expecting to grow a ton very soon.

And in fact, pinecone took down the job post 8 days later, which means they filled the position quickly, so we should see them doing a lot of hiring in the near term.

pinecone has raised $38 million total and last raised in March 2022; expect to see continued fundraising from them soon.

Contact their CEO Edo Liberty (cool name) for more information.

We’ve added pinecone to our spreadsheet that tracks startup recruiter hires here.

Employee Fiancées

“Employee engagement” is the kind of nebulous phrase that can make one’s eyes glaze over.

But for large companies, knowing if their employees are happy and “engaged” with their work is valuable information to have.

Depending on the study you read, happy employees are 12%-20% more productive than unhappy ones, so getting to the bottom of employee engagement/happiness can be a huge win for companies.

And you can’t improve something if you can’t measure it; that’s where inFeedo comes in.

inFeedo’s platform offers surveys, NPS scores, and a chatbot called “Amber” to collect data points from employees about how they feel things are going at work, as well as help them with work-related admin tasks.

Their platform collects employee responses throughout the employee’s time at the company from first being a candidate, to onboarding, to performance reviews, to exit interviews.

Company leaders get summaries of the data so they have their finger on the pulse of how engaged their workforce really is.

(Boy, would I love to see the numbers on how engaged Twitter employees are today vs. 12 months ago…)

This might all sound a little soft for the business world, but the reality is that companies are willing to spend big money on this.

It’s a large, growing market; the employee engagement market is slated to more than double in size to $3.8 billion over the next decade.

Not to mention inFeedo has just doubled their open job posts in the past month:

• February 1: 5 open jobs

• February 26: 10 open jobs

And one very-recently-closed job they filled was for a Head of Sales Development, which is a great positive growth indicator.

inFeedo has raised $16 million to date, most recently in March 2022; this doubling of open job posts a year later means business is likely going well and we wouldn’t be surprised to see them fundraising again soon.

Reach out to their CEO Tanmaya Jain for more information.

Remember, we have a spreadsheet of every company we’ve seen positive indicators for, and we just added inFeedo as well as every company in this week’s email to the list 😎

A Break from Software

Sure, we talk about a lot of software companies, but every now and then, you come across a literal jet engine company.

H3X is a maker of what they call “high density integrated motor drives.”

Now, we aren’t remotely smart enough to understand what that means.

But we do understand the end goal: they make motors small and efficient enough to convert planes to all-electric power.

Now that we can understand!

Making planes go all-electric would be a significant climate win; aviation produces about 2.5% of all CO₂ emissions, but that percentage will grow as cars increasingly go electric.

H3X is relatively early stage for a hard-tech company, but they have begun deliveries to customers this month, and they have won a $1.25 million Air Force contract as well, so they are walking the walk.

On top of that, H3X doubled their open job posts this month:

• January 15: 6 open jobs

• February 2: 11 open jobs

The roles are primarily engineering, but also include a Head of HR which is a nice sign of growth and company building.

They raised a $3.8 million seed round in 2021, but don’t have any announced fundraising since then.

Get in touch with their CEO Jason Sylvestre if you’d like to learn more.

Peace✌️

What’d you think of this week’s newsletter?

Reply and let us know how we did! Maybe you could say:

“Oh, I didn’t know employee engagement companies made money, thanks!”

or

“Please only tell us about software and not super cool world-saving jet engines”

Or whatever you like! We love feedback ❤️

Til next week,
- startup spotter