skilled-trades
(23)
Ripley PR Learned to Speak Plumber - Then Made the Trades Newsworthy
From a Maryville office, Heather Ripley built an agency around an unfashionable insight: the people who fix boilers, wire homes and run franchises do not need louder publicity. They need an interpreter.
Cassey Gibson Is Turning Sawdust Into Software
The INNERGY CMO grew up sweeping a pattern-maker's floor. Now she sells software, education and a larger idea: the trades deserve better stories about themselves.
Transfr Put the Trade School in a Headset - Then Learned Who Would Pay for It
The workforce-education company sells institutions a safer, repeatable way to let learners try real jobs before betting their lives on them. Its useful lesson is less about virtual reality than about finding the buyer with both the pain and the budget.
Mark Kasdorf Left the App Economy to Build a Heat-Pump Workforce
After bootstrapping a mobile studio to $25 million and selling it to Accenture, the serial founder chose a harder interface: houses, crews and the stubborn shortage of skilled labor.
Tommy Mello Put a Garage Door Business on Rails
He began with a paint sprayer, a battered car and a useful place in the phone book. The real breakthrough came when Tommy Mello stopped trying to be the best technician in the truck and started building a company that could move without him.
Scott Sailer Builds the System Behind the Steel
At Southland Trailers, a second-generation operator turned shop-floor lessons into a system for growth - then made apprenticeships, welding classrooms and a very large pancake breakfast part of the same plan.
Mohawk College Turned the Community College Into an R&D Partner - Here’s the Playbook
The Hamilton college found a sharper edge than adding more courses: let students solve live industry problems, let employers borrow the labs, and make applied research part of the education rather than a campus side project.
The $1.5 Billion Business Behind the Knock at Your Door
American Residential Services turned leaky pipes, failed furnaces and midnight air-conditioning calls into a national machine. Now the operator behind ARS/Rescue Rooter is pairing local technicians with centralized scale - and AI in the tool bag.
Sila Services
Sila Services is assembling a regional home-repair network without sanding the names off the trucks. Its bet is that the best way to scale HVAC, plumbing and electrical work is to keep local trust out front - and put recruiting, technology and capital behind it.
Hiller Plumbing, Heating, Cooling & Electrical
Hiller started with $500, one truck and a promise to leave the work area clean. Thirty-six years later, its real product is bigger than plumbing or HVAC: a repeatable system for making an anxious homeowner feel in control.
A1 Garage Door Service
A1 Garage Door Service built a national home-services platform around the moment a 200-pound moving wall refuses to move. Its real product is not the spring or the opener - it is a repeatable system for turning household panic into a scheduled, trained and warrantied repair.
Snap-on
The famous red tool van is only the visible part of Snap-on. Underneath it sits a century-old system of close customer access, credit, engineering and repair data that turns a wrench company into infrastructure for modern work.
Samuel Bottum
Samuel Bottum built a marketing career around a practical idea: a durable brand begins with the people who know the work. At Snap-on, that has meant linking product innovation, customer insight and technical education across one unusually varied career.
Dave Schneider
Dave Schneider is Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Red Wing Shoe Company, the family-owned, Minnesota-based maker of iconic American work boots founded in 1905. He leads the company's global marketing practice, spanning brand management, digital and traditional communications, ecommerce, retail experience, brand protection, and corporate communications, reporting directly to the CEO. After years in senior roles at leading agencies including Digitas, Tribal DDB, and BBDO, he brought an agency creative sensibility to an operator's job, championing a marketing model that balances long-term brand equity with performance-driven revenue while putting the skilled-trades workers who wear the boots at the center of the brand's story.
TRUEWERK
Truewerk is a Denver-based, direct-to-consumer performance workwear brand that borrows fabric technology and construction from the outdoor and military apparel industries and applies it to clothing for skilled trade professionals. Founded in 2015 by former homebuilder Brian Ciciora, the company is best known for its temperature-graded WerkPant system (T1, T2, T3) built from 4-way-stretch, water-resistant, abrasion-resistant synthetic blends that outlast and outperform traditional cotton work pants. Sold primarily through its own e-commerce site alongside a growing uniform-services offering, Truewerk has raised roughly $35M and pitches itself as workwear engineered for comfort, mobility, and durability on the jobsite.
DeepHow
DeepHow is a Detroit-based enterprise AI company that turns the hands-on know-how of experienced industrial workers into structured, searchable training. Founded in 2018 by former Siemens innovation leaders, its platform uses vision AI and machine learning to capture expert workflows on video, automatically segment and transcribe them into step-by-step guides, and - in its newer 'physical AI' products - verify that frontline operators are performing tasks correctly in real time. Used by manufacturers, pharma companies and field-service organizations to close skills gaps as veteran workers retire.
Peoplelink Group
Peoplelink Group is a South Bend, Indiana-based family of staffing and workforce-solutions companies founded in 1987. Operating a portfolio of specialized brands across administrative, light industrial, skilled trades, IT, professional, and quality-inspection services, it connects more than 5,000 workers with employers nationwide each day. Led by CEO Christophe Jeusse and backed by French staffing group Groupe CRIT, the company blends nationwide reach with a boutique, relationship-driven service model built on People, Process, and Performance.
Emerge Career
Emerge Career is a New York-based reentry and workforce development company that partners with governments to train and place justice-involved and low-income people into high-paying, AI-resilient skilled-trade careers such as commercial truck driving, HVAC, and diesel technology. Its technology platform combines self-paced vocational coursework, exam prep, trauma-informed career coaching, and job placement, with training delivered in partnership with licensed schools and correctional agencies. Founded in 2022 out of Y Combinator by Uzoma Orchingwa and Gabriel Saruhashi, the company has won state and city contracts from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York City's Next Mile NYC program.
Laborup
Laborup is a Knoxville, Tennessee startup building an AI-powered recruiting platform for America's skilled industrial workforce - the machinists, welders, and maintenance techs that keep factories running. Founded in 2024 by former Stanford AI researcher Tasimba 'Simba' Jonga, it uses voice-first AI agents to interview and profile blue-collar workers in minutes, then matches employers to a vetted network of thousands of tradespeople. The company pitches itself as the 'LinkedIn of manufacturing,' promising faster time-to-fill, lower cost-per-hire, and better retention, and has raised roughly $7.7M in total funding.
SkillCat
SkillCat is a mobile-first, simulation-based training platform that turns a smartphone into a trade school. For about $10/month it teaches HVAC, plumbing, electrical, appliance repair and maintenance skills, prepares learners for industry certifications like EPA 608 and OSHA-10, and connects them to skilled-trade jobs. More than 300,000 learners have used it to launch or advance a trade career.
Ruchir Shah
Ruchir Shah is the founder and CEO of SkillCat, a mobile-first training platform that has taught more than 300,000 people to enter skilled trades like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and appliance repair. A Rice-trained energy engineer with a Stanford MBA, he started building animated industrial simulations after researching the BP oil spill and concluding that bad training kills. His first company, LearnToDrill, trained 25,000 oil and gas workers for clients like Halliburton and BP. When COVID threw skilled workers out of jobs while contractors begged for help, Shah pivoted to SkillCat to bridge that gap with simulation-based, $10-a-month trade education. He also runs the GRIT Foundation to introduce trades careers to underserved youth, and once spent a summer doing stand-up comedy in New York.
Simba Jonga
Simba Jonga is the founder and CEO of Laborup, an AI-powered hiring platform often described as the LinkedIn of manufacturing. A University of Tennessee chemical engineer turned Stanford AI researcher, he built Laborup after watching skilled machinists, welders and technicians struggle to get hired despite working inside high-tech factories. The platform uses an autonomous AI voice agent to interview and vet workers, building profiles in minutes and matching them to high-paying industrial jobs. Laborup has raised $7.7M from investors including NVP, Torch Capital and angels Jeff Dean, Jeff Jordan and Evan Moore, grown a 25,000-strong East Tennessee worker network, and is expanding across the South and Midwest.
Uzoma Orchingwa
Uzoma 'Zo' Orchingwa is a Nigerian-American social entrepreneur and the co-founder and co-CEO of Emerge Career, an AI-powered workforce development and reentry company that partners with governments to train and place justice-involved and low-income people into high-paying, AI-resilient skilled trades. He previously co-founded Ameelio, a technology nonprofit that broke open the exploitative prison communications industry by offering free letters, calls and education to incarcerated people and their families. A Yale-trained lawyer and Cambridge criminologist who moonlit as a DJ, he has been named to MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35 and Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business.