The rise in on-demand services from the likes of Uber, Lyft and Postmates is fuelling a new workforce of freelancers in the service industry who are not tied to single places of employment and can work hours that are more suitable to them. Shiftgig — a startup that has built a mobile platform for hourly workers to pick up shifts at local businesses looking for staff to fill gaps in their schedules (Shiftgig=shift work+gig economy) — is today announcing that it has raised $20 million to scale up its marketplace. This round, a Series C, includes a mix of new and existing backers — DRW Venture Capital, FJ Labs, GGV Capital, KDWC Ventures, and an affiliate of William Blair — and brings the total raised by Shiftgig to $56 million. (The plan will “certainly” be to use some of the funding to scale that out even more, Lou said.) The idea is that businesses connect on to the Shiftgig platform to fill any number of shifts. In the case of Shiftgig, the company goes through its own set of qualification and vetting checks, which also change over time as businesses rate employees (termed “Specialists” in Shiftgig’s marketplace) after each shift worked that ultimately result in reliability scores for workers. There is a lot of infrastructure in place today, but it wasn’t always this way. At its peak, it connected 1.4 million job seekers with over 30,000 small businesses. “By listening to our customer’s needs, we pivoted the business to an on-demand marketplace connecting businesses with people seeking short term gigs. “Shiftgig is the largest and best temporary staffing startup in the world,” said Fabrice Grinda, co-founder of FJ Labs, in an email to us.
The rise in on-demand services from the likes of Uber, Lyft and Postmates is fuelling a new workforce of freelancers in the service industry who are not tied to single places of employment and can work hours that are more suitable to them. Now a similar kind of flexibility is finding its way into the world of hourly work, too.
Shiftgig — a startup that has built a mobile platform for hourly workers to pick up shifts at local businesses looking for staff to fill gaps in their schedules (Shiftgig=shift work+gig economy) — is today announcing that it has raised $20 million to scale up its marketplace. This round, a Series C, includes a mix of new and existing backers — DRW Venture Capital, FJ Labs, GGV Capital, KDWC Ventures, and an affiliate of William Blair — and brings the total raised by Shiftgig to $56 million. The company is not disclosing its valuation but sources tell us it’s around $150 million post-money.
For now, this puts Shiftgig well ahead of two notable competitors in terms of funds raised for growth. Others in the same space include Workpop and Wonolo, both of which have raised under $10 million to date (see here and here).
Shiftgig’s raise comes about a year after Renren, the “Facebook of China”, led Shiftgig’s last round of $22 million. Since then, the company has been seeing “solid growth”, in the words of Eddie Lou, the CEO and co-founder. Today, there are some 1,500 businesses and 15,000 workers using the platform, which has customers across all 50 states but with a concentration in about 12 cities. (The plan will “certainly” be to use some of the funding to scale that out even more, Lou said.)
Today, Shiftgig works with a wide range of business clients mainly in the food service, hotel, retail, logistics, warehouse, and experiential…
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