US Startup hiring fell below pandemic low (source: Carta, through June 2023)

Carta is a cap table company that also gathers data from 2,000+ US startups. Here are key findings from their Hiring study released last week (January 2020 - June 2023):

- May 2020 was the lowest point of pandemic startup hiring; roughly 18,000 employees were hired

- In June 2023, startups hired 12,449 employees

- At the peak in January 2022, startups hired 69,952 employees

- In the first half of 2022, startups hired 314,000 employees.

- In the first half of this year, that number fell to 129,000.

- Since January 2020, net headcount (hiring - departures) had never fallen for more than 1 month consecutively. It’s fallen for 5 out of the 6 months to start 2023.