The signal comes weeks before the need
A company announcing a funding round is about to hire, open an office, replace its tools and often its vendors. A company appointing a new sales director is about to rethink its prospecting; a new CIO, its suppliers. A new office in Lyon means premises, local hiring, local partners. The need is not yet phrased, but its announcement is already public.
And it is public on LinkedIn first. The founder posts the round on signing day, the trade press picks it up three days later, the paid database indexes it the following week. The new sales director announces their own arrival, with the standard formula: "Thrilled to join … as …". Whoever reads LinkedIn is weeks ahead of whoever reads the press.
The problem is volume and attention. These announcements are drowned in everything else, and the feed shows only a fraction of them. Prosko watches the phrases that characterise them, in the LinkedIn feed and search, and sends you every post that contains them — the person, their job title, the excerpt, the link.
The rule that catches these announcements
Market announcements have a precious property: they always use the same words. Nobody raises money without writing "funding round", "raised" or "Series A". Nobody takes a job without writing "join" and "as". The rule builds on those formulas.
A multi-word trigger fires when all of its words appear in the post, in any order: "funding round" catches "our round of funding closed" as well as "funding round announced". Case, accents and hyphens are ignored.
The thing to watch here is the noise of the meta-conversation: for every founder announcing a round, ten consultants post "how to nail your funding round". Hence the exclusion "how to raise", and above all the AI assistant, to which you describe the intent in one sentence: "a company announcing its own funding round, not advice on the subject". It re-reads the posts your words picked up and discards the rest.
Make one rule per signal, not one rule for the whole market. Funding rounds in one rule, appointments ("join as", "appointed", "takes over as") in a second, new locations ("opening an office", "new branch", "now in") in a third. Every alert carries the name of its rule: you know at a glance which signal it is.
What it catches
Two posts like the ones market intelligence surfaces in an ordinary week. The names are made up; the phrasing is not.
"Proud to announce we have just raised €3M to accelerate on the French market. Thanks to our investors and the team. We are hiring — twelve positions open by June."
"Delighted to join Ardex Systems as sales director. First project: structuring regional prospecting. If you have lessons learnt to share, I am all ears."
The first announcement holds three signals in one: a round, hiring to come, a target market. The second is an appointment with, in plain words, the newcomer's first project — and an invitation to get in touch.
The alert you receive
"Proud to announce we have just raised €3M to accelerate on the French market. Thanks to our investors and the team. We are hiring — twelve positions open by June."
The person, their job title, the excerpt, the link to the post. "Checked by the assistant" means the assistant re-read the post and confirmed it is an actual announcement, not an article about funding rounds. Alerts pile up in the extension — the last five hundred — and, if you wish, in a Slack or Discord channel the whole team reads.
Doing something with it
Congratulating is not prospecting. On announcement day, the author receives two hundred congratulations and twenty sales pitches. The pitches go in the bin. A sincere, short comment, with no link and no pitch, puts you on the list of people they will remember — that is all it takes that day.
The right time is three to six weeks later. Time for the team to reorganise and for needs to take shape. Keep the alert, set a reminder, come back with something precise: "you announced twelve hires by June; here is how we helped a company in the same situation".
An appointment is handled differently. The newcomer is trying to understand their market and their suppliers. They are more available during their first three months than they will ever be again. A message that brings useful information about their sector — not about you — opens a conversation.
Share the stream. A market intelligence rule interests sales, management, sometimes investors. Sent to a shared channel, each alert becomes a starting point for a discussion, not a piece of information someone keeps to themselves.
What to know before you start
- The announcement at the source. You read the founder's or the newcomer's post, not a record rebuilt a week later: what they say about the amount, the hiring, the market, you get as is, with the link to reply.
- Targeting is your words. Add your sector's vocabulary to the triggers and describe it in the intent given to the assistant: monitoring narrows to your market without complicated settings.
- It does nothing on your behalf. No message, no connection request sent without you. Prosko tells you; timing and tone are yours.
- Everything runs in your browser. No server, no account on our side: your target accounts and finds never leave your machine. In return, monitoring works while Chrome is open.
Frequently asked questions
How do I target a specific sector?
Through words. "Funding round" alone surfaces the whole market; "funding round" plus your sector's vocabulary ("industrial", "workshop", "maintenance") in the same rule narrows it. Above all, describe the sector in the intent given to the AI assistant: "an industrial software company announcing its round". It discards the rest.
Does it work for announcements in French?
Yes. The watched words are the ones you write. A single rule can contain "funding round" and "levée de fonds", "Series A" and "série A".
Can I watch a specific list of companies?
Yes: their names as triggers, in a dedicated rule. It is the same mechanism as brand monitoring, applied to your target accounts or your competitors.
How far ahead of the press?
It depends on the sector, but the LinkedIn announcement generally precedes the trade press by a few days, and indexing by paid databases by a week or more. The advantage is not being first in the world; it is being told the same day without having to look.
Who sees what I watch?
Nobody. Your rules and finds stay in your browser's local storage; there is no server on our side, no account, no telemetry. The only outside destination is the Slack or Discord channel you configure yourself.
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