This newsletter was originally sent on March 25, 2022.

Hey there,

We've still been working on Employbl and shipped some pretty rad updates. Some of which include:

• We have a map! (again) The Employbl project started out with less than 500 startups and a Google Map where you could filter by company categories. Now we're at over 11,000 companies in the database, tons of filters and a Mapbox map of ~4,000 companies in the Bay Area. I'd really like to get this to looks like an AirBnB / Zillow style map with filters but turns out plotting 11,000+ points from a database all over the United States with filters is technically complex. Go figure 🤷🏼 🗺

  • If you'd like to see the original map and what we have today check this tweet.

• Job Board is updated To be honest there are a million job boards but this is nice to be able to query like "show me all Software Engineering jobs at companies backed by either Sequoia or First Round Capital". You can also do more refined searches like show jobs based on industry or custom company collection but ya still a lot to do here and job search software is a pretty competitive space with a lot of noise. One future improvement we can make here is to group the job listings results by company and display more about the company. I really like how Breakout List shows their records, just a shame you can't click on the founders or the investors to learn more about them. We'd have to remedy that!

• Homepage copy updates and...

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🥁🥁🥁 Employbl is now officially free to use! 🥁🥁🥁

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We had a paywall up but the people who did sign up all churned quickly after signing. Being free allows us to share company data more freely and makes the tool accessible to more people, which is an ultimate goal of the project. Perhaps if lots of people sign up and we get a thriving community going there will be potential to earn revenue from companies. For now though the product is free to use and we don't even have advertisements :)

Startup News

We recently fetched the freshest fundraising rounds. Here are some buzzworthy funding events that have happened in the past month:

• ​AngelList raised a $100 million Series B round. This is their second Series B, the first was all the way back in 2015.

• One year old Xata.io raised a $30 million Series A out of Ohio. They build serverless database services for developers.

• ​Health Gorilla raised a $50 million Series C. Seems like they build APIs for healthcare patient data.

• ​Apollo (sales solution) raised a $110 million Series C. They're based in San Francisco.

• ​Reforge education and professional training service raised a $60 million Series B. This one I'm excited to keep an eye on. They run training programs specifically built to help people advance their careers in the tech industry. I wish them well. It means more competition for Galvanize and Lambda School, hopefully leading to better options for workers.

• ​Veev pulled down a whopping $400 million Series D to buy up a lot of American real estate and build smart homes.

• New company Inworld AI entered the Metaverse with a $10 million Seed round. They're one year old.

• ​Roofstock has more capital to play with after closing a $240 million Series E round this month. They're based in Oakland, CA 🙌🏼

It seems like the big money is flowing into Real Estate so I'd expect we're going to see some corporate consolidation there.

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What info would you like to see in future newsletter? Have you tried logging into Employbl yet? What should we build next?