Company buying signals

$ Set up https://jell.run/SKILL.md, then check acme.com for hiring, funding and stack changes in the last 90 days and score it hot, warm or watch.

Account scoring built on firmographics alone answers "does this company look like our customer". It cannot answer "is this company buying right now", which is the only question that changes what a rep does on Monday morning.

Signals answer the second question. They are public, dated events that correlate with budget being released: a team being staffed, a round being closed, a tool being added or dropped. This guide turns three of them into a score you can sort a list by.

The three signals worth paying for

company.jobs          →  what they are staffing, and when they posted it
company.funding       →  rounds, amounts, dates, investors
company.technologies  →  the stack they run today

Each one is cheap enough to run across a whole account list on a weekly cron. Together they separate accounts that are moving from accounts that merely fit.

Hiring: the loudest public signal

A job posting is a company publishing its own gap. It is dated, specific, and impossible to fake at scale.

curl -X POST https://api.jell.run/v1/run \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $JELL_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "capability": "company.jobs",
    "input": {"domain": "acme.com", "posted_within": "60d", "limit": 25}
  }'

Read three things from the result, not one:

• Which function is growing. Five engineering roles and no sales roles is a product-stage company. The reverse is a company with something to sell and a number to hit.
• Seniority of the first hire. A first "Head of X" posting means the function is being created, which is when tooling budget gets approved. A tenth individual contributor on an established team means the tooling decision was made years ago.
• Velocity. Three postings this month against zero last quarter is the signal. A steady one per month is background noise.

Drop the domain and pass query and location instead and the same capability becomes prospecting: it returns the companies hiring for a role, which is an account list you did not have to buy.

Funding: dated budget

curl -X POST https://api.jell.run/v1/run \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $JELL_API_KEY" \
  -d '{"capability": "company.funding", "input": {"domain": "acme.com"}}'

Total funding, the latest round with its amount and date, the full round history and the investor list.

The useful field is the date of the latest round, not the amount. Money raised eighteen months ago is committed. Money raised six weeks ago is being allocated, and the allocation meetings are happening now. A 45 to 120 day window after announcement is when new-vendor decisions cluster.

The investor list has a second use: shared investors are the warmest introduction path that exists, and it is sitting in the response.

Technographics: the replacement trigger

curl -X POST https://api.jell.run/v1/run \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $JELL_API_KEY" \
  -d '{"capability": "company.technologies", "input": {"domain": "acme.com"}}'

Detected stack plus a last_visited timestamp. Two plays:

• Competitive replacement. They run the tool you displace. The pitch writes itself, and you know which integrations they will ask about.
• Complement. They run a tool you integrate with. Shorter cycle, lower risk, and the integration is the demo.

The real signal is the diff, not the snapshot. Store the technology list per domain each week and alert on additions and removals. A company that just added an analytics tool is rebuilding measurement; one that dropped a CRM is mid-migration and buying adjacent tools.

Scoring, honestly

The temptation is a weighted formula with a lot of decimal places. It rarely beats a simple, explainable set of tiers:

Keep the signal itself attached to the record. A rep who can see "posted 3 lifecycle marketing roles in the last 45 days" writes a better first line than one who sees "score: 82".

Running it as a cron, not a batch

Signals are only worth what their freshness allows. The pattern that works:

1. Weekly, for every account in the active list, call company.jobs with posted_within: "30d".
2. Monthly, call company.funding and company.technologies.
3. Diff each response against what you stored last time.
4. Score only the accounts whose diff is non-empty. Everything else keeps its previous tier.

At the starting prices this is a few cents per account per month, and the third step is what keeps it there: you pay for the fetch, not for re-scoring.

Pair it with news.search on the company name when you want the press narrative behind a round, and with social.search when you want to see whether the team is publicly talking about the problem you solve.

Where it breaks

• Job boards are not complete. Coverage is strongest for companies that post publicly and weakest for those hiring through networks only. Absence of postings is not absence of hiring.
• Funding data lags announcements and is thinner outside the venture-backed segment. A profitable bootstrapped company with real budget will look like nothing here.
• Technology detection is inference from public surfaces. It sees what a site exposes. Internal tooling, and anything behind a login, is invisible.
• Signals decay. A 90-day-old signal scored as if it were fresh is worse than no signal, because it produces confident outreach about a decision already made.

Run it as an agent

jell run -c company.jobs -i '{"domain":"acme.com","posted_within":"30d"}'
jell run -c company.funding -i '{"domain":"acme.com"}'
jell run -c company.technologies -i '{"domain":"acme.com"}'

An agent with the skill installed can run the whole weekly pass, diff it against what it stored, and only escalate the accounts that changed.

What does each call cost?#

Prices below are the starting price per successful call. /v1/inspect returns the exact figure before the run and reserves it against your balance; failures and unbilled no-matches release the hold in full.

One prepaid balance covers every row. Capabilities marked coming soon are listed but not yet executable.

FAQ#

Which of the three signals is worth the most?

Hiring, by a distance, because it is the most frequent and the most specific. A posting names the function, the seniority and the date, which is enough to write a first line. Funding is rarer but higher intensity when it fires. Technographics are the weakest alone and the strongest in combination, because a stack change plus a hire in the same function is a project starting.

How long after a funding round should I reach out?

The 45 to 120 day window after announcement is where new-vendor decisions cluster. Immediately after is too early, since the team is still hiring and planning, and the inbox is full of every other vendor who set the same alert. Past six months the budget is allocated and you are competing with an incumbent choice rather than an open question.

Do I need to store history, or is the current snapshot enough?

You need history. A snapshot tells you a company runs a tool and has three open roles; it cannot tell you that both changed last week, which is the actual signal. Store each weekly pull and score the diff. It also cuts cost, because you pay for the fetch and not for re-scoring accounts that did not move.

What does it cost to monitor a list of accounts?

A few cents per account per month at the starting prices: a weekly job check, plus a monthly funding and technology check. The saving comes from scoring only the accounts whose diff is non-empty, so the compute and the analyst attention scale with change rather than with list size.

Why is company.signals marked coming soon if the others are live?

company.signals is the merged, single-call version: hiring, funding and news on one dated timeline. The three underlying capabilities are live today and give you the same inputs with more control over each. When the merged capability ships it will be a convenience over the same data, not new data.

What API should I use to enrich a list of domains with company size, industry and funding?

company.enrich returns employee count, industry, headquarters and description from a domain, routed across LeadMagic, Apify, Hunter, Apollo and People Data Labs data behind one schema. company.funding adds rounds, amounts, dates and investors. Both are per call with no charge on a miss, so enriching a list of a thousand domains costs what it actually matches.

Which API tells me what technologies a company uses on its website?

company.technologies returns the detected stack (CMS, analytics, CRM, payments, hosting) for a domain, routed across DataForSEO, BuiltWith and Wappalyzer data. It is the replacement trigger in this guide's scoring: a company that just switched CRMs is more likely to buy the things that plug into the new one.

Is there an API for company funding rounds and recent news for outbound prospecting?

Yes, as two calls on one key: company.funding for the round history and news.search for dated Google News articles about the company. The 45 to 120 day window after a round is when new-vendor decisions cluster, and the news call is how you catch the announcement the funding database has not ingested yet.