Interplanetary Talent Services (IPTS) (opens new window), a recruiting firm that has placed more than 700 people at frontier technology companies, has acquired Talent Protocol, a reputation platform that scores builders on their public work. Talent Protocol’s verified record of 6.6 million builder profiles will help IPTS identify candidates for roles across AI, AI safety and security, crypto, decentralized systems, hardware, life sciences, and other frontier technologies.
Both companies grew out of the Protocol Labs network. Protocol Labs was among Talent Protocol’s earliest investors, backing the company’s 2021 seed round, and became the main sponsor of Talent House, its scholarship program for builders that ran across 12 editions and supported 116 technologists from more than 15 countries. IPTS came from the other direction: it was founded at the end of 2023 by recruiters who had worked inside Protocol Labs and spun out to lead hiring for the network, as well as for other frontier technology companies.
The acquisition will help IPTS further its mission of building better, more transparent, and evidence-driven infrastructure for connecting exceptional people with organizations creating technology that moves humanity forward.
Frontier technology companies frequently need people whose abilities are difficult to capture through job titles, academic credentials, or resumes. The strongest evidence is often the work itself: products shipped, code contributed, and side projects. Yet that evidence is scattered across different platforms and rarely available to recruiters in a useful form.
Talent Protocol, which was co-founded by Pedro Oliveira, Filipe Macedo, and Francisco Leal, built a system that can help companies identify candidates whom conventional recruiting tools miss: 86 million events collected across 6.6 million builder profiles, a Builder Score measuring demonstrated work, and a verification check confirming that a profile belongs to a real person rather than a bot.
“Some of the most important technologies for the future of humanity are being built right now, and finding the people capable of building them matters enormously,” said Ian Brunner, co-founder and CEO of IPTS. “Talent Protocol has spent five years measuring builder activity. Bringing that record together with IPTS’s relationships across frontier technology gives us a better way to discover exceptional people and connect them with work that matters.”
Following the acquisition, Talent Protocol will conclude its commercial operations, and talentprotocol.com (opens new window) will become home to a public-good version of Builder Score, the company’s self-service app, which lets anyone calculate and verify a score from public blockchain and GitHub data. (The Talent Protocol legal entities and $TALENT token were not part of the transaction.)
“Talent Protocol was built on the belief that what someone ships is a stronger signal than conventional credentials,” said Pedro Oliveira, co-founder and CEO at Talent Protocol. “This acquisition puts the unique dataset we created to work, helping IPTS match exceptional people with frontier technology companies. And making Builder Score a public good means anyone can use it, inspect how it works, fork it, and build on top of it. Both of those outcomes serve the thing we set out to do: make sure the people who build get found.”
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