labor-marketplace
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Shiftsmart and the art of shrinking a job
A job can be too large a commitment. A shift can fit. Shiftsmart built a labor marketplace around that distinction - and is now asking what those hours actually accomplish.
Veryable and the expensive fiction of an average day
A warehouse can hire for its average workload and still be wrong every morning. Veryable sells a way to match labor to the day that actually arrives - provided managers know what that day requires.
Buildforce wants electricians to work themselves into the next job
Finishing a building can mean losing a job. Buildforce is betting that electrical staffing, portable work records, and a proper payroll can make the next assignment less of a gamble.
The Shift That Wouldn’t Stay Filled
A warehouse can fill a shift on paper and still have an empty loading dock at dawn. WorkWhile built its business around that gap between a booking and a person who actually arrives.
Yong Kim
Yong Kim is the co-founder and CEO of Wonolo, an on-demand staffing marketplace that connects businesses with more than one million frontline workers across the United States. Born in Seoul, he moved alone to a New Hampshire boarding school at 15, graduated as valedictorian, and went on to the University of Chicago and Harvard before a career in tech investment banking at Deutsche Bank. A stint at a Coca-Cola innovation accelerator exposed the broken state of hourly staffing and led him to launch Wonolo in 2014. The company has raised roughly $200 million, including a Sequoia-led round, and Kim has become a prominent voice for treating gig and hourly workers with dignity, flexibility, and fair pay.
Traba
Traba is a technology-driven marketplace that matches light industrial businesses - warehouses, distribution centers, manufacturers and event venues - with vetted temporary workers who pick up shifts through a mobile app. Founded in 2021 by Mike Shebat and Akshay Buddiga, the company uses AI, geolocation and computer vision to fill shifts fast and cut the no-shows that plague traditional staffing agencies, reporting a 99% fill rate against a roughly 46% industry average. Backed by Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst, Traba has raised about $45.6M and positions itself as infrastructure for the industrial supply chain, with staffing as the starting point.
Wonolo
Wonolo is an on-demand staffing marketplace whose name stands for 'Work Now Locally.' Founded in 2013 out of Coca-Cola's Founders program, it connects businesses that need workers for warehousing, delivery, merchandising, event staffing, and general labor with a pool of more than one million registered workers ('Wonoloers'). Employers post shifts that can be filled in minutes, and workers browse and accept nearby gigs through a mobile app with fast payouts. The company has raised over $200 million in venture funding and is used by thousands of companies across the United States.
Mike Shebat
Mike Shebat is the co-founder and CEO of Traba, a New York-based labor marketplace that supplies vetted on-demand workers to warehouses, distribution centers, and light industrial employers. He started the company in 2021 after seeing, from inside a McMaster-Carr shipping floor and later Uber Eats, how often temp workers simply don't show up. Traba has raised roughly $46 million from Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures, and Shebat, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, runs it on a famously intense in-office schedule.
Instawork
Instawork is an AI-powered on-demand staffing platform that connects businesses with vetted hourly workers across hospitality, warehousing, food service, retail, and light industrial sectors. Operating in 400+ cities across the U.S. and Canada, the company uses over 2 billion data signals to match businesses with pre-vetted workers, achieving a 98% worker show rate and filling 90% of jobs within 24 hours — metrics that traditional staffing agencies rarely approach. Founded in 2015 and backed by Y Combinator, Benchmark, Greylock, and TCV, Instawork has raised $171M and serves 15,000+ businesses, with a network of 10M+ workers. The platform handles everything from a single catering shift to large-scale distribution center operations.
Lennie Sliwinski
Lennie Sliwinski is the co-founder and CEO of Trusted Health (Trusted, Inc.), a San Francisco-based healthcare technology company he launched in 2017. Inspired by watching his mother navigate the chaos of nursing staffing, he built the leading labor marketplace and workforce management platform for healthcare professionals, growing the platform to over half a million nurse profiles and partnerships with hospitals in all 50 states. With $234M raised across three funding rounds, Trusted went from digitizing the travel nursing placement process to launching Works - a full enterprise workforce OS for health systems. Before Trusted, Sliwinski cut his teeth as a Cornell-trained lawyer who never practiced law, a performance marketer at Adlucent, and Director of Marketing at Hired in San Francisco.
Trusted Health
Trusted Health is a labor marketplace and workforce management platform for the healthcare industry, connecting nurses and allied health clinicians with hospitals through software that replaces the legacy travel-nursing agency model. Its consumer-facing platform helps nurses find travel and per-diem jobs; its enterprise Works platform helps health systems build internal float pools and on-demand workforces.