In an era where economic data is both a lifeline for investors and a lightning rod for political debate, New York-based Revelio Labs has stepped into the fray with its latest innovation. On September 4, 2025, the workforce intelligence firm launched Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS), a free, monthly dataset aimed at providing a more transparent and timely snapshot of the U.S. labor market.
Launch of New US Jobs Data Series
Coming on the heels of the contentious July Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report that showed weaker-than-expected job growth and a series of downward revisions over the past few months, RPLS’s debut headline figure—approximately 50,000 jobs added in August—underscored its potential to challenge the status quo. This compares to the BLS’ actual August payroll number of 22,000 reported on Friday, September 5, 2025, and the market consensus figure of 75,000 jobs added in August.
Revelio Labs, founded in 2021, has built its reputation on aggregating and standardizing billions of public employment records from online profiles, job postings, and other sources to create what it calls the world’s first universal HR database. Unlike traditional surveys, which often suffer from low response rates and delays, Revelio’s approach leverages AI to process data from over 100 million U.S. professional profiles, capturing roughly two-thirds of the employed workforce.
Revilio Labs’ newest data series, the RPLS distills this vast repository into key macroeconomic indicators: non-farm employment levels, hiring and attrition rates, job openings, and salaries from new postings. Released the day before BLS’s “Jobs Friday” and JOLTS reports, it offers a preemptive peek that could reshape market expectations.
The timing of the launch is no coincidence. Recent upheavals at the BLS—including the dismissal of its commissioner amid downward revisions to prior job numbers and the nomination of a vocal critic to replace her—have eroded public trust in official statistics. President Trump’s intervention highlighted fears of politicization, while longstanding issues like funding shortfalls and outdated methodologies have left the agency struggling to keep pace with a dynamic post-pandemic economy. Revelio’s CEO, Ben Zweig, positioned RPLS as a “complement” to BLS data, emphasizing its correlation (0.74) with establishment survey figures but with smaller, less volatile revisions. By focusing on full-time professional workers and using real-time online data, RPLS avoids the BLS’s sampling biases, providing granular breakdowns by occupation (SOC codes), sector (NAICS), and state.
The inaugural August release painted a cooling picture of the labor market. While education and health services drove modest gains, overall hiring and attrition rates dipped, signaling a post-surge normalization. Active job postings trended lower across sectors, reflecting uncertainty from geopolitical tensions and interest rate hikes. Notably, salaries in new postings rose 0.6% month-over-month, with tech-heavy information sectors leading at 1.1%—a boon for investors eyeing wage inflation as a Fed signal. This forward-looking wage data, absent in BLS reports, could prove invaluable for forecasting consumer spending and corporate margins.
RPLS is just the latest in a string of ambitious product launches from Revelio over the past year, cementing its role as a go-to provider for alternative data in finance. In August 2024, the firm rolled out COSMOS, touted as the most comprehensive job postings dataset on the market, aggregating millions of listings to track labor demand in real time. This tool has become essential for hedge funds modeling hiring trends and predicting sector rotations.
Fast-forward to May 2025, Revelio acquired Salary Board, a specialist in real-time compensation benchmarking, bolstering its global analytics capabilities. The deal expanded access to granular pay data across 150 countries, helping firms navigate talent wars and DEI initiatives amid rising equity scrutiny. Just a month later, in June 2025, Revelio introduced the Employee-Linked Patents dataset, linking USPTO filings to its workforce profiles. This innovation tracker reveals R&D hotspots—think AI at Google or biotech at Moderna—offering investors a proprietary edge in valuing intangible assets like innovation pipelines.
Our Take
Revelio’s recent product launches reflect the firm’s aggressive expansion, backed by $19 million in Series A funding completed in July 2024. By democratizing high-quality labor insights—RPLS is free, while others are subscription-based—the firm is disrupting a market dominated by opaque government sources. For investment professionals, this means sharper alpha generation as traders might be able to front-run BLS surprises, while long-term allocators gauge structural shifts like the AI skills boom.
Yet, challenges for Revelio loom. Critics may question the representativeness of online profiles, which skew toward white-collar workers and overlook gig economy nuances. Revelio counters with rigorous standardization and seasonal adjustments, but as adoption grows, so does the risk of data manipulation allegations in a polarized climate.
In sum, RPLS and its siblings position Revelio as a sentinel for the modern economy. As markets grapple with uncertainty, this private-sector pivot could restore faith in US economic data—or at least provide the tools to trade on them more confidently. With the Fed’s next moves hanging in the balance, expect RPLS to become a staple in every economist’s toolkit.