It is 5:40 on a Friday. A line cook texts that he is not coming in, service starts in ninety minutes, and the general manager is scrolling a phone contact list of every off-duty server she has ever met. This is the moment Qwick built a company around. Not a market, not a category - a single, recurring emergency that plays out in restaurants, hotel banquet halls and stadium concourses thousands of times a night. Qwick's answer is to make that emergency a two-tap transaction: post the open shift, and within minutes a vetted, ready-to-work professional accepts it and heads over.
Qwick is an on-demand staffing marketplace for hospitality. On one side are businesses with shifts to fill - bartenders, cooks, servers, dishwashers, banquet and event staff. On the other are freelance workers the company insists on calling "Professionals," who set their own availability and pick up shifts through an app. The platform vets the workers, matches them to shifts, handles the pay, and asks both sides to rate each other afterward. The company reports filling shifts roughly 95% of the time, with an average fill time near half an hour.
Figures as published by the company; scale blends the pre-merger Gigpro and Qwick networks and is approximate.
01 / The ProblemThe problem is a moment, not a market
Hospitality has a chronic labor problem, and the company describes it in the language operators actually use: coverage gaps, compliance risk, payroll chaos. Turnover in food and beverage runs high, schedules are volatile, and a single no-show can sink a dinner service or leave a 400-person wedding under-poured. Traditional temp agencies were built for a slower clock - phone calls, day-long lead times, paper timesheets. A callout at 5:40 does not wait for any of that.
The founding insight, in the original Qwick telling, was almost a joke. A hotel-owner co-founder mused that it would be "a miracle" to summon a banquet server or line cook at your fingertips, the way you order a car through an app. That framing - staffing as an on-demand utility rather than a staffing-agency relationship - is still the whole pitch. Qwick sells operators a fill rate and a stopwatch.
Qwick's entire product is a single moment most operators dread: the shift nobody is standing in. The recurring emergency the marketplace is built around
02 / How It WorksHow the marketplace actually works
For a business, the loop is deliberately boring: create a shift, set the role and the hourly rate you will pay, and publish it. Qualified Professionals nearby get a notification and can accept on the spot. Both sides rate each other after the shift, and the businesses can "favorite" pros they like so those workers see their shifts first next time. Higher-rated Professionals get matched to more work - accountability pointed in both directions, which is the mechanism that keeps a gig marketplace from decaying into a lottery.
Post
A business posts an open shift with role, time and the hourly rate it will pay.
Match
Vetted Professionals nearby are notified and accept the shift in real time.
Work
The pro shows up and works the shift; hours are tracked in the app.
Rate & Pay
Both sides rate each other; the pro can cash out fast, often within the hour.
The payment piece is more strategic than it looks. Professionals can cash out as fast as roughly 30 minutes after clocking out - the company charges a 3% fee for that instant option - while businesses get multi-state payroll and 1099 handling done for them. Same-day pay is not a courtesy; it is a supply lever. Paying people fast is how the marketplace keeps enough of them willing to accept the 5:40 shift in the first place.
03 / The DealThe reverse merger nobody expected
Here is the twist that makes Qwick worth studying. There were two companies. The original Qwick launched in Phoenix in 2017, raised a $40 million Series B in 2022, and landed at No. 32 on the Inc. 5000 that year. Gigpro launched later in Charleston, South Carolina, led by co-founder Sam Mylrea, and by 2023 was the fastest-growing company in its state. In 2024 Gigpro raised a $16 million Series A led by Foundry.
In 2025 the two joined forces - and the smaller, younger Charleston company effectively took the wheel. The combined business kept the better-known Qwick name, but moved its center of gravity to Charleston, with Mylrea as CEO and his Gigpro co-founder Adam Phillips as chief product and strategy officer. The old Gigpro web addresses now redirect to qwick.com. It is the rare deal where the acquirer adopts the target's brand and the underdog's leadership runs the merged whole.
This funding will allow us to empower more hospitality professionals, further advance our leading technology platform, and continue to provide exceptional service. Sam Mylrea - CEO & Co-Founder
04 / The MoneyA 40% markup and same-day pay
The business model is a marketplace take-rate. The worker keeps the hourly wage the business posts. Qwick adds a service fee on top - reported at roughly a 40% markup - for the matching, vetting, background checks, payments and compliance. Revenue scales with shifts filled rather than software seats sold, which is why the company keeps pushing into adjacent products: recruitment tools to convert good freelancers into full-time hires, multi-state payroll, and compliance handling that turns a legal headache into a selling point.
Across both brands, the company has raised in the neighborhood of $78 million. The rounds tell the story of two lineages folding into one.
Round figures are drawn from public announcements; total combined funding is approximate as databases still track the two companies separately.
05 / The CustomersWho's actually hiring
The demand side is broader than "restaurants." Qwick staffs bars, hotels and their banquet operations, catering and foodservice-management firms, country clubs, senior-living and retirement communities, universities, stadiums and sports arenas, and one-off event venues. The logos it has shown off range from national names like Hilton, Sheraton, Marriott and Aramark to regional favorites such as Mellow Mushroom and Taco Boy. Pre-merger, Gigpro alone reported more than 9,000 businesses served.
The supply side is the more interesting asset. A network of hundreds of thousands of vetted Professionals is hard to rebuild, and it compounds: thousands of workers have used one-off Qwick shifts as an audition, turning a single gig into a permanent job. That "try before you hire" loop is a quiet retention engine for the operators and a career ladder for the workers.
06 / The CompetitionHow it's different from the field
Qwick is not alone in the on-demand staffing lane. Instawork is the closest direct competitor; Wonolo leans toward warehouse and general labor; Bluecrew built its model on W-2 employment rather than 1099; and Traba, Jitjatjo, Shiftsmart, Snagajob and PeopleReady all crowd the edges. General job boards - Indeed, ZipRecruiter - sit further out, solving permanent hiring rather than the 5:40 gap.
The differentiation is less a single feature than a posture. Qwick sells the same problem to three different departments inside a hospitality business: operations sees a coverage gap, finance sees payroll chaos, and legal sees compliance risk. Bundling the fix - matching, pay and compliance - into one platform is how it argues it is more than a fancier temp agency.
07 / The MarketWhere it fits
Zoom out and Qwick sits at the intersection of two durable trends: a hospitality industry that cannot reliably staff itself, and a workforce that increasingly wants flexible, choose-your-own-shift income with pay that lands the same day. The gig economy's loudest fights happened in rideshare and delivery; the quieter, stickier version is happening in the back of house, where a single reliable network of vetted workers is genuinely defensible.
Whether the merged company can turn a marketplace into a full "workforce operating system" - the direction its newer recruitment, payroll and compliance products point - is the open question. What is already clear is the shape of the bet: own the moment the shift goes empty, and everything else in hospitality staffing has to route through you.