hourly-workers
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Joseph Kitonga Put a Healthcare Idea in a Mall Kiosk - Then Took It Nationwide
A family business exposed the gap. A $10,000 student prize funded the first attempt. Joseph Kitonga built Vitable by meeting workers face to face, then kept widening the map.
Tito Goldstein
Tito Goldstein is the co-founder and co-CEO of Teambridge, an AI-native, composable workforce management platform built for hourly, shift-based, and frontline teams. A former principal product designer at Uber, he and co-founder Arjun Vora interviewed thousands of drivers and realized the self-service and agency of the Uber app was missing for the roughly 60% of the global workforce still stuck on legacy tools. After two years of near-zero revenue, they rebuilt the product as configurable building blocks, and it outsold two years of prior work in its first month. Teambridge now serves 200+ enterprise customers and over 500,000 workers, has raised $35M+ including a $28M Series B, and Goldstein was named to Forbes' Top AI Founders to Watch in 2025.
Kobby Amoah
Kobby Amoah is the co-founder and CEO of River Health, a Minneapolis-based subscription health plan built for hourly workers in the United States. Born in Ghana and educated at Wartburg College and MIT's idea-stage accelerator, he previously founded Obaa, a mobile electronic medical records venture for developing countries. River Health pairs virtual primary care, behavioral health, and prescription delivery for a flat monthly fee, and has partnered with national restaurant operators to bring coverage to employees who fall through the gaps of traditional insurance.
Alex Bradford
Alex Bradford is the co-founder and CEO of Rain, a Santa Monica fintech that lets hourly and frontline workers tap wages they have already earned before payday instead of turning to payday loans or overdrafts. A former McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and SAC Capital analyst with a Stanford degree and a Harvard MBA, Bradford launched Rain in 2019 after spotting that payroll and timekeeping systems had finally opened their APIs. The company plugs into employers' payroll and HCM systems (including a native Workday integration), has connected millions of workers and distributed more than $2 billion in earned wages, and has raised capital from investors including QED, Invus and Prosus. Bradford's pitch is personal: he grew up with a single mother in the 1980s and built Rain to kill predatory lending and give workers control over their own money.
John Waldmann
John Waldmann is the founder and CEO of Homebase, the team-management app built for the people who run local businesses - restaurants, salons, retail shops and the hourly teams behind them. Started in 2014 after watching a childhood friend drown in paper schedules and his sister juggle unpredictable bartending shifts, Homebase now serves more than 150,000 businesses and 3.8 million workers, processing hundreds of millions of shifts a year with scheduling, time clocks, payroll, messaging and earned-wage access. A Stanford GSB grad who once sold tuxedos and started his first online business at 13, Waldmann is an unapologetic believer in accountability over consensus, 'operating velocity,' and the idea that AI will create more small business owners, not fewer.
Rushi Patel
Rushi Patel is the Co-Founder and COO/CRO of Homebase, the all-in-one workforce management platform serving 100,000+ small businesses and 2+ million hourly workers. With a background spanning McKinsey, KKR, and Microsoft, Patel co-founded Homebase in 2014 alongside John Waldmann to give local business owners - restaurants, retailers, and service businesses - the same quality workforce tools that enterprise companies take for granted. Under his leadership, Homebase has raised $198M in funding including a $60M Series D in April 2024, and grown to 1,900 employees while generating approximately $180M in annual revenue.
Sumir Meghani
Sumir Meghani is the CEO and Co-Founder of Instawork, a San Francisco-based on-demand staffing platform connecting over 4 million skilled hourly workers with businesses across hospitality, light industrial, and warehousing sectors. A Stanford and Harvard Business School alumnus and Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, Meghani built Instawork from a Y Combinator S15 startup into a $171.8M-funded company operating in 30+ markets across the U.S. and Canada, earning the EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2023 Bay Area Award and back-to-back Inc. 5000 rankings.
Desmond Lim
Desmond Lim is the co-founder and CEO of Workstream, an HR, payroll, and hiring platform built for the 70 million hourly and deskless workers in the US. Born in Singapore to a delivery driver father and part-time cleaner mother, he became the first in his family to attend university, went on to Harvard and MIT, and built a company that now serves 46 of the top 50 quick-service restaurant brands — including McDonald's, Burger King, and Dunkin' — while raising over $120M in venture funding.