A chemical engineer who watched welders and machinists get left behind by hiring built for office workers - so he built the platform that calls them, listens, and lands them a better-paying job.
Most software founders chase the people who already have it easy - the engineers, the marketers, the folks who live on a keyboard. Simba Jonga went the other way. He went toward the factory floor.
Jonga is the founder and CEO of Laborup, an AI hiring platform he describes as the blue-collar counterpart to LinkedIn - except built for action rather than scrolling. The premise is almost stubbornly simple: the machinists, welders, mechanics and maintenance technicians who keep American manufacturing running have never had a real digital front door to the job market. Laborup is that door, and it opens with a phone call.
Instead of asking a worker to sit down and type out a resume, Laborup's AI voice agent calls them, asks questions, listens, reasons, and assembles a detailed profile on its own. A welder who has never written a resume in his life can have one in about five minutes - usually the only window such a worker has anyway. As Jonga puts it, skilled tradespeople "work with machines, so the only time they have to sit down to actually write out a resume is usually on a weekend or after work." The whole product is an answer to that single observation.
The results read like a recruiter's fantasy: customers report hiring roughly ten times faster, at more than 50% lower cost, with three times better retention. The workers themselves see an average wage increase of about 20%. That last number is the one Jonga keeps returning to, because it is the one that changes households, not just hiring funnels.
This is not a coastal company cosplaying as middle-American. Laborup was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and built its first network there. Within three months of launching in the Knoxville metro, one in five of the region's manufacturing workers were active on the platform - out of roughly 48,000 in the area. By 2025 the East Tennessee network had grown past 25,000 workers and was climbing toward a statewide target of 100,000.
What makes the story land is who showed up to fund it. Laborup has raised $7.7 million, and the cap table is a strange, telling mix: institutional venture firms alongside some of the most recognizable names in technology. Jeff Dean, the chief scientist of Google DeepMind, is an angel. So is Jeff Jordan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. So is Evan Moore, a co-founder of DoorDash, and James Slavet of Greylock. The people who built the consumer internet are quietly betting on the guy reconnecting the industrial economy.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you're making centrifuges, packaged goods like beans or chassis for cars.— Simba Jonga, on why one talent network can serve every factory
Before the term sheets, Jonga was a chemical engineering student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with a minor in economics. During those undergraduate years he worked as a manufacturing engineer for some serious names - the pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG, the chemical maker Dow, and in automotive manufacturing. He stood inside plants packed with cutting-edge machinery and noticed something that did not fit: the hiring around all that technology was decades behind it.
He graduated in 2022 and was named a UT Torchbearer, the university's highest student honor. Then he went to Stanford to study artificial intelligence - but not in a vacuum. He split his time between Stanford HAI, researching where AI was actually headed, and the Hoover Institution, studying the macro pressures squeezing American manufacturing. It was the rare education that put the technology and the labor problem in the same room.
In October 2023 he started building Laborup part-time. He called manufacturers across the country and kept hearing the same complaint: a single skilled role could sit open for about three months. The engineers had LinkedIn. The tradespeople had nothing comparable. He had found the gap, and eventually he took a leave of absence from his Stanford graduate program to chase it full-time.
Manufacturing-engineer stints that put him on the floor, where he saw modern machines run by a hiring process stuck in the past.
Chemical engineering, economics minor, and a Torchbearer honor - the school's highest student distinction.
AI research at Stanford HAI plus manufacturing economics at the Hoover Institution. Then: leave of absence, all-in on Laborup.
He didn't build it alone. Jonga co-founded Laborup with Logan O'Neal, a computer science student he first met through UT's Haslam College of Business back in 2019.
The two had clicked over a shared appetite for startups long before they had a company to start. When the moment came, the engineer who understood the factory floor teamed up with the builder who could ship the software. One early customer summed up why they took a chance on the young founder with a single word: "You had gumption."
That word fits. Jonga frames the entire mission in plainspoken, almost democratic terms. "It's really about simplifying what it means to be online," he says - the idea that a person shouldn't need a polished personal brand to be found by good work. And the payoff isn't a vanity metric. "With an average pay bump of around twenty percent," he says, "we are affecting the income for generations." For a worker, a 20% raise is not a rounding error. It is a different life, compounded across a family.
The expansion plan follows the logic of the thesis: scale the worker network past 100,000 across Tennessee, then push into Alabama, Georgia and Ohio, with Knoxville as the sales hub and a new Nashville office at Pinnacle at Symphony Place handling product engineering. The bet underneath all of it is that America's manufacturing labor gap - a roughly trillion-dollar problem - is at heart a matching problem, and matching is exactly what AI is good at.
Roles that sat open for about three months get filled in a fraction of the time.
Customers cut the cost of filling a skilled role by more than half.
Better matches mean workers actually stay in the jobs they take.