“Get In Early” (GIE) #002: Entelo

If you’ve ever looked at a mega-company and thought, “I should’ve joined when they were still fitting the whole team into one Zoom grid”,
then you already understand the itch behind “Get In Early” (GIE). The idea is simple: find a SaaS company right after it hits
product-market fitbefore the org chart gets so big you need a search bar to locate your own manager.

In GIE #002, the spotlight lands on Entelo, an HR tech company that leaned hard into data-driven recruiting and
predictive analyticsbasically, the belief that talent sourcing shouldn’t rely on luck, LinkedIn rabbit holes, or a recruiter’s sixth cup of coffee.
Entelo’s story is also a tidy little time capsule of HR tech over the past decade: sourcing, automation, candidate engagement, bias mitigation,
consolidation, and ultimately, becoming part of a larger talent platform.

What “Get In Early” Really Means (and Why It’s Not Just Hype)

SaaStr’s “Get In Early” format wasn’t about random startups with vibes and a logo. The series aimed to feature SaaS companies that were already
proving something measurable: between $1M and $10M in ARR and growing at a pace that suggested they weren’t just “doing well”
but accelerating. In the Entelo edition, the pitch wasn’t “one day we’ll be big.” It was “we’re already movingwant to hop on while the
rocket’s still boarding?”

Why does that stage matter? Because it’s the sweet spot where:

• The product is real (customers pay actual money, not “exposure”).
• The market is validating the need (renewals and expansions start telling the truth).
• The team is still small enough that individuals can have outsized impact.
• Roles are being built, not just filledgreat for career growth, mildly chaotic for your calendar.

In other words: “Get in early” doesn’t mean “get in blind.” It means “get in when the traction is visiblebut the opportunity is still wide open.”

Entelo in the GIE Spotlight: The 2015 Snapshot

In the GIE #002 write-up, Entelo is framed as a company already well into its stridepast the “is this a thing?” phase and into the “how fast can we
scale this thing?” phase. The metrics and positioning were clear:

• Size: mid–seven-figure ARR
• Growth: roughly 11% month-over-month (tracked back to late 2014)
• Business model: moving upmarket with $18k+ ACV
• Go-to-market: a split of inbound and outbound, with SDR capacity scaling
• Buyer: leaders in talent/recruiting and HR (VP/Director-level, plus CHRO/VP HR)
• Positioning: predictive recruiting + outreach analytics (think “sales-style outreach,” but for recruiting)
• Location: San Francisco
• Logos mentioned: a who’s-who list of recognizable enterprises and high-growth tech brands

That combinationhealthy ACV, fast growth, and a defined buyersignals something important: Entelo wasn’t just building HR tech. It was selling
into organizations with real hiring pain, real budgets, and real expectations.

So… What Did Entelo Actually Do?

Entelo’s core idea was bold in a very practical way: if companies could use data to predict churn, forecast revenue, and optimize ad spend,
why were recruiters still sourcing talent like it was 2009 and everyone replied to InMail?

1) It built richer candidate profiles by aggregating public signals

Early on, Entelo described its engine as a way to assemble a more complete “resume” by pulling signals from across the public webespecially sources
relevant to technical talent (think developer communities and social platforms). The value wasn’t only “more names.” It was “more context,” packaged
into something recruiters could actually search.

2) It aimed at the hardest target: passive candidates

The most valuable hires are often the least available. Entelo focused on helping recruiters find and engage people who weren’t actively applying.
That meant surfacing candidates and enabling outreach workflows that looked more like modern sales development than old-school recruiting.

3) It leaned into predictive recruiting (“More Likely to Move”)

One of Entelo’s most memorable concepts was the idea of predicting which passive candidates were most likely to change jobs soon. In recruiting terms,
it’s basically saying: “Don’t knock on every doorknock on the doors where the moving truck is already parked.”

The practical outcome? Recruiters could prioritize outreach to candidates who were statistically more open to a conversationsaving time and increasing
response rates. It’s a simple lever, but it matters: response rate is the lifeblood of sourcing.

From “Search” to “System”: How Entelo Expanded the Platform

The GIE edition describes Entelo as more than a databaseit positioned the company as a platform combining predictive sourcing with
outbound email tracking and analytics. That’s an important strategic choice: sourcing tools are valuable, but sourcing + engagement
becomes a workflow. And workflows tend to stick.

Over time, Entelo’s product direction pointed toward automation and scale:

• Automation for sourcing: reducing manual hours spent searching and qualifying
• Outreach systems: templates, tracking, analyticsmaking recruiting outreach more measurable
• Pipeline building: not just “find someone,” but “build a repeatable funnel”

The HR tech market was also heating up. As more vendors entered “AI recruiting,” Entelo’s differentiation leaned on its data approach and its attempt
to operationalize recruiting the way revenue teams operationalize sales.

Funding and Growth: The Receipts Behind the Momentum

Entelo’s momentum wasn’t purely narrativefunding milestones and customer adoption helped confirm the market pull.

Early traction and Series A

In the earlier part of Entelo’s story, reporting noted rapid customer adoption and a Series A raise to grow the product and team. The company’s pitch
revolved around “Big Data” recruitingbuilding a large database of potential candidates and improving the predictive engine behind matching and outreach.

Series B: pushing into the enterprise

By 2016, Entelo raised a significant Series B round explicitly framed around accelerating enterprise and mid-market growthplus scaling headcount.
The language used around that time emphasized measurable growth and expanding adoption.

Series C: doubling down on AI, matching, and scale

In 2017, Entelo announced a Series C round with a clear intention: improve the behind-the-scenes matching, collect more unstructured signals,
and build stronger machine learning capabilities. Reports from that period also highlighted competitive pressurefrom both new AI-first entrants
and large incumbents.

The important “GIE lesson” here isn’t just the funding. It’s the sequence: traction → platform expansion → bigger market bets.
That’s often what “getting in early” looks like when it’s working: a company keeps finding the next layer of the problem and charging into it.

Bias, Fairness, and “Unbiased Sourcing Mode”: A Very 2018 Problem (and Still a 2026 Problem)

As AI entered recruiting, a big question followed: can technology reduce biasor does it accidentally automate it? Entelo publicly leaned into this
conversation by introducing features designed to reduce bias in sourcing workflows.

One widely discussed capability was an “Unbiased Sourcing Mode” that let recruiting teams anonymize or hide certain identity cues
during search and review. The goal: reduce snap judgments based on name, photo, school, gaps in employment, graduation dates, and other proxy signals
that can trigger biased screening.

Whether any tool fully “solves” bias is a bigger debate than one product can settle. But it’s notable that Entelo treated bias mitigation as a
product featuresomething recruiters could turn on in the flow of work, not just a nice idea in a slide deck.

2019: Entelo Acquires ConveyIQ (and Goes Full “Source-to-Hire”)

In 2019, Entelo made a major move: acquiring ConveyIQ, a company known for candidate engagementthink messaging, nurture campaigns,
and managing candidate interactions at scale. The combined story was positioned as end-to-end management of candidate engagement from sourcing through
hiring, including re-engaging existing candidate databases (a goldmine most companies forget they own).

Strategically, this made sense. Sourcing without engagement is like collecting phone numbers and never calling. Adding engagement capabilities pushed
Entelo closer to a full recruiting “operating system,” not just a sourcing tool.

2022 and Beyond: Entelo’s Technology Joins a Larger Talent Platform

HR tech has a pattern: point solutions prove value, then platforms consolidate them. In 2022, SilkRoad Technology announced it was adding Entelo’s
candidate search and recruitment marketing technology to its talent acquisition capabilities.

Fast-forward, and Entelo’s branding is now presented as part of Rivalpositioned within a broader suite that aims to unify sourcing,
outreach, tracking, and analytics. In early 2026, Rival’s messaging around this combined platform emphasizes modern talent acquisition as a single,
connected engine rather than separate tools glued together with spreadsheets and hope.

Why Entelo Was a Classic “Get In Early” Candidate

Looking back, Entelo matched the GIE criteria for more than just revenue and growth. It had the ingredients that tend to create career and company
inflection points:

• A clear wedge: predictive sourcing for passive candidatesan urgent, expensive pain point.
• A defined buyer and budget: HR leaders with real hiring targets, not “someday” plans.
• Workflow stickiness: sourcing + outreach + analytics becomes a daily habit for recruiting teams.
• Room to expand: from search to automation to engagementeach step increasing platform value.
• A huge market: hiring is perennial, and talent scarcity makes “better sourcing” a durable category.

It also shows a modern truth about SaaS: you don’t have to become a household name to be a meaningful platform. Many companies build real impact,
acquire real customers, then become key components inside larger ecosystems.

How to “Get In Early” Today (Using Entelo as the Playbook)

If you’re applying the GIE mindset in 2026whether as a job seeker, buyer, or investorEntelo’s story offers a practical checklist.

Look for the numbers, not the noise

• Evidence of repeatable sales: ACV growing, clear buyer persona, a working outbound + inbound mix.
• Growth that persists: not just one viral quarterconsistent month-over-month expansion.
• Hiring aligned to growth: revenue roles, customer success roles, and product/data roles scaling together.

Check the “workflow gravity”

Tools that live inside daily workflows tend to win. Recruiting is a workflow-heavy job. Entelo’s best moments were tied to making that workflow faster:
finding candidates, prioritizing the right ones, and automating outreach.

Watch for the “platform pull”

When a company starts adding adjacent capabilitiesengagement, automation, analyticsit’s often a sign customers want more than a point solution.
That can lead to bigger contracts, deeper adoption, and eventual platform consolidation (either building a platform or joining one).

Experience Notes: What “Get In Early” Feels Like in the Entelo Universe (500+ Words)

Since “Get In Early” is as much a human story as a metrics story, here are a few experience-style snapshotsrealistic scenarios inspired by how
recruiting technology teams typically work at this stage of growth.

1) The recruiter who stops “spraying and praying”

Imagine a recruiter at a fast-growing company with 30 open roles and exactly zero spare hours. Their day used to look like this: search, scroll,
message, wait, repeatthen do it again because half the profiles were stale and the other half weren’t actually a fit. When a predictive signal like
“more likely to move” becomes part of the workflow, something subtle changes: the recruiter stops trying to reach everyone and starts focusing
on candidates who are more likely to respond now. The emotional shift matters. It turns recruiting from a morale-draining grind into a more
controllable system. Instead of feeling like they’re shouting into the void, they feel like they’re working a plan.

2) The SDR team that discovers recruiting is basically sales (surprise!)

In the GIE snapshot, Entelo is described as scaling outbound while building inbound. That’s the moment where sales development becomes a craftand a
culture. Early SDRs in a growing SaaS company often learn two truths quickly: (1) messaging beats volume, and (2) consistency beats occasional heroics.
In recruiting tech, the parallels get hilarious. You’re not selling a subscription; you’re selling time-to-fill, quality-of-hire, and fewer hiring
manager tantrums. The best SDRs learn to speak fluent recruiter pain: “How many roles are stuck?” “Where do your best hires come from?” “What does a
week of sourcing time cost you?” It’s not glamorous. It is effective. And when it works, you can see the company’s confidence rise quarter by
quarterbecause pipeline isn’t luck anymore. It’s built.

3) The candidate experience becomes an actual strategy

The ConveyIQ acquisition-era story highlights a truth candidates feel every day: most recruiting outreach is either too generic or too late. When
engagement tools get layered into sourcing, teams can run smarter, more respectful communicationnurture campaigns for silver-medalist candidates,
role-specific follow-ups, and outreach that references real signals instead of “Loved your background!” (which is recruiter-speak for “I skimmed your
headline.”) Candidates notice the difference. They may not call it “candidate engagement software,” but they will say things like: “That message actually
sounded like it was meant for me.” In a tight labor market, that’s not a nice-to-have. That’s a competitive advantage.

4) The bias conversation gets operational, not theoretical

Most organizations agree bias is a problemright up until it’s time to change how decisions are made. Tools like “unbiased sourcing” features can be a
bridge between intention and execution. The experience for a recruiting team can be surprisingly practical: a hiring manager looks at a candidate slate
that’s been anonymized and starts focusing on skills, experience, and evidence of impact rather than proxies. It doesn’t magically erase bias from the
world, but it does something useful: it changes the first screen. And the first screen matters because that’s where many candidates get filtered out
before they ever have a chance.

Taken together, these experience-style moments explain why GIE companies can be career accelerators. You’re not just joining a product. You’re joining a
set of problems that matterand you’re early enough to influence how those problems get solved.

Wrap-Up: The Real Lesson of “Get In Early” #002

Entelo’s GIE moment captured the company in a high-traction phase: meaningful ARR, strong growth, upmarket motion, and clear demand in a hot HR tech
category. The years that followed show the broader arc many successful SaaS companies takeexpanding from a wedge product into a platform, adding
adjacent capabilities like engagement and automation, then becoming part of a larger suite as the market consolidates.

If you’re using “Get In Early” as a strategy today, the Entelo story is a reminder that the win isn’t only IPO-or-bust. The win can be building real
leverageskills, impact, and growthat the stage where your work visibly changes the company’s trajectory. That’s the kind of “early” that keeps paying
dividends long after the team stops fitting on one Zoom screen.