Homebase is a San Francisco-based workforce management platform built for small businesses running hourly teams. Founded in 2014, it combines employee scheduling, time tracking, payroll, HR compliance, and team communication in one mobile-first app. As of 2024, the platform serves over 150,000 businesses and 3.8 million hourly workers, having logged 8 billion hours and processed $3 billion in gross payroll. Backed by $198 million in total funding, Homebase competes by bundling tools that small business owners previously paid for separately - and more recently by embedding AI assistants across hiring, scheduling, and payroll.
Hourly is a Palo Alto-based fintech platform that combines payroll, workers' compensation insurance, and time tracking into a single mobile-first system built for small businesses with hourly workers. Its pay-as-you-go workers' comp model calculates premiums against actual wages in real time, eliminating year-end audits and helping employers avoid overpaying. Founded in 2018 by Tom Sagi, Shay Litvak, and Amir Faintuch, the company raised $39M+ and serves 500+ businesses across construction, manufacturing, transportation, and similar industries. In July 2025, Hourly was acquired by Israeli insurtech WeSure in a deal valued at approximately $168M.
Lumber is an AI-powered construction workforce management platform that unifies payroll, time tracking, HR, safety, compliance, and field productivity for contractors. Founded in 2023 by Shreesha Ramdas and Manish Kumar, the company is building autonomous AI agents for an industry where 41% of the workforce is set to retire in seven years.
Kourosh Zamani is the Co-Founder of Laurel, the AI-native time platform automating timesheet creation for professional services firms. Starting as Ping Inc. in 2016 alongside co-founder Ryan Alshak - a fraternity brother from UC Berkeley - Kourosh shepherded the company from bootstrapped startup through five funding rounds to a $100M Series C in June 2025, with investors including IVP, Google Ventures, Alexis Ohanian, and Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI). Before building Laurel, he ran VP of Business Development at Bailard Inc. and founded the Young Professionals of San Francisco, a non-profit that grew to 8,000+ members. His career arc from investment management to COO to Head of Sales to Strategic Partnerships lead mirrors the evolution of Laurel itself: from scrappy time-tracking app to a platform processing over $5B in gross market value for 100+ enterprise clients.
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.
COR is an AI-powered management platform built for creative and professional services firms — advertising agencies, consulting companies, law firms, and IT shops — that need to understand where their time actually goes and whether their projects are making money. By automating time tracking and layering on predictive analytics, COR gives agency leaders real-time visibility into project profitability, team capacity, and billing gaps before they become losses. Founded in 2017 in Silicon Valley by former agency operator Santi Bibiloni and co-founders Jose Gettas and Gabriel Marin, COR serves clients including Havas, Publicis, Ogilvy, Dentsu, and DDB across 35+ countries, with a reported $6.6M ARR and backing from investors including the founders of DoubleClick, Anaplan, MercadoLibre, and Krux.
Santi Bibiloni is the Co-Founder and CEO of COR, an AI-powered project profitability platform built for creative agencies, consulting firms, and professional services. Born in Buenos Aires and now based in San Francisco, he bootstrapped his first agency Balloon Group to 400 clients across 12 countries before pivoting to solve the profitability problem he lived firsthand. COR has raised ~$7.9M, grown 9% month-over-month, and counts Ogilvy, BBDO, and McCann among clients in 38 countries — backed by unicorn founders and the board member who built DoubleClick.