Stealth Tracking

Find people in stealth mode on LinkedIn, and the ones who just came out of it — a signature capability, especially popular with VCs.

Stealth Tracking makes stealth status something you can search on. Ask for everyone currently in stealth, or everyone who came out of it in the last quarter, and slice either population with the full set of profile filters.

What "stealth" means here. People between ventures (often founders starting something new) frequently obscure their current role on LinkedIn ("Stealth," "Building something new," hidden employer, etc.) before they're ready to announce. These are some of the highest-signal people to reach, and they're hard to find with normal filters precisely because they're hiding.

Operation	What it does	Reference
Stealth founders search	People in stealth or recently out of it, sliced by the full profile-filter set	`stealthFoundersSearch`
Stealth founders count	Exact number of matching profiles, without pulling them	`stealthFoundersCount`

Two modes

Every search sets stealthConfig.mode:

Mode	Finds
`in-stealth`	People currently in stealth
`left-stealth`	People who recently exited stealth

Both accept date windows, absolute or relative:

enteredStealthAt — narrow by when they went into stealth. Available in both modes, so in left-stealth you can ask for people who were heads-down for a year before launching, and skip the ones who were in stealth for three weeks.
leftStealthAt — left-stealth only. Defaults to the last year if you omit it, so you get recent launches rather than everything on record.

Filter it like any other search

Stealth founders search takes a full searchParams object on top of the stealth config: the same filters people search uses. Prior employer, seniority, location, keywords, education, and career timing all compose with stealth status, so you can narrow to something like ex-Stripe, in stealth since March, in the Bay Area.

Results come back with the most recent transitions first. Page with pageSize (1–1,000, default 25) and the returned cursor.

A cursor belongs to the mode that produced it. Switching between in-stealth and left-stealth means starting a new pagination run, not reusing the cursor you have.

Sizing a search first

The stealth founders count returns how many profiles match, without pulling them.

The count is exact, however large the population, so you can size a thesis before you pull a single profile.

What comes back

Each profile carries a stealth career block alongside the usual profile fields:

Field	What it tells you
`enteredStealthAt`	The earliest time the person appears in stealth data. They may have gone stealth earlier.
`lastConfirmedInStealthAt`	The most recent time the person still appears in stealth
`leftStealthAt`	The earliest time the person appears out of stealth, or `null` if they're still in
`daysInStealth`	How long the stealth stretch has lasted so far
`transitions`	Before-and-after snapshots of their current roles, oldest first, showing how a "Founder @ Stealth Startup" line changed into a named company

Read transitions when you want the story, not just the dates: when a founder's role picks up a real company name, the company is usually ready to be found.

Alerting on people you already care about

To be alerted about people already on your list, use the Tracker rule person_stealth_changed:

{
  "type": "person_stealth_changed",
  "entityType": "person",
  "direction": "entered"
}

Set direction to watch entries, exits, or either. See Tracker for adding entities and receiving signals.

Why VCs love it

Reach founders before the announcement. Someone in stealth is often about to start a company.
First-mover advantage. Stealth signals surface opportunities that competitors using snapshot data can't see.

Use cases

Venture sourcing: find prospective founders before a launch is public.
Launch monitoring: run left-stealth on a schedule against your thesis filters to catch new companies as they surface.
Talent signals: a key contact entering stealth may be about to leave; pair with Tracker rules for churn detection.
Recruiting: identify people quietly between roles and likely open to a move.

Using it effectively

Combine stealth status with prior employer, seniority, or location, because stealth alone matches a large population.
Set enteredStealthAt to bound how long someone has been in stealth.
Count before you search: the count is exact, so it's a reliable way to tune filters before spending.
Query both modes when mapping a space, and dedupe client-side — someone can be in stealth now and have left a different stealth company earlier.

Cost

Stealth founders search bills 1 credit per profile returned, the same rate as people search. A page that comes back short is charged short, so an over-generous pageSize costs nothing extra.

The stealth founders count bills 1 credit per request regardless of how many profiles match. It's a cheap way to size a search, but not free.

Both endpoints share a rate limit of 120 requests/minute. The chargeInfo on each response is what you were actually charged; see Billing & credits.

Credit amounts are defaults — custom pricing is available for bulk use cases.

Search — the filter set that composes with stealth status.
Tracker — alerts on watched people, including stealth transitions.
Contact Reveal — reach the founders you find.

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