Internal mobility marketplaces.

Why now

Retention is cheaper than hiring. Internal mobility programs need software.

What the signal looks like

Repos with HRIS adapters, skills-graph libraries, and project-management integrations.

Public examples

We name publicprojects + categories only, never founders we track inside the paid product. The buyer’s edge stays inside the product.

• Gloat / Eightfold internal mobility
• Mercury Mobility shape
• Open-source skills-graph libraries

What this displaces

An annual goal-setting meeting + a LinkedIn search.

How to validate it in an afternoon

Before committing build time or a thesis memo to internal mobility marketplaces, run three cheap checks against public engineering activity. Each takes minutes and none require access to private data.

1. Count active builders. Search GitHub for repositories matching this category, then check how many accepted commits in the last 14 days. More than a handful of active teams means the category has energy, not just mentions.
2. Look for the trickle, one deal per quarter pattern in funding. If funded companies keep appearing here, few rounds land in this category in a given year, buyers are rare. Cross-check the hr tech leaderboard to see whether any of the accelerators sit adjacent to this niche.
3. Test the one-quarter build cost assumption honestly: expect a quarter of sustained build time, usually two or three people, before first external users. If your calendar cannot absorb that, the opportunity is real but not yours yet.

The weekly signal feed tracks 10 HR Tech sub-niches including this one, so the cohort side of this check can run continuously instead of manually.

Common questions about this niche

Buyer?

Large enterprise HR leaders.

Pricing?

Per employee per year.

Defensibility?

Skills-graph depth + integrations.