Assembled is a San Francisco-based software company building the workforce management and AI agent platform for modern customer support teams. Founded in 2018 by three Stripe veterans, it now helps companies like Stripe, Robinhood, GoFundMe, Etsy, and Intercom forecast demand, schedule agents, and resolve a growing share of tickets with AI across chat, voice, and email.
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.
Humand is a mobile-first, all-in-one HR platform built for the 2.7 billion deskless and frontline workers who have never had a proper digital work home. Founded in 2020 by Nicolas Benenzon and Geronimo Maspero, the platform combines 30+ HR modules - from internal communications and payroll to performance reviews and AI-powered automation - into a single app. With 1.6 million workers across 1,500+ organizations in 51 countries, and a $66M Series A raised in February 2026 co-led by Kaszek and Goodwater Capital, Humand is positioning itself as the operating system for the world's largest workforce segment.
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.
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.
Max Wang is the Co-Founder and CTO of Workstream, a San Francisco-based HR and payroll platform built specifically for America's hourly workforce. He co-founded China's AngelList equivalent (VC.CN) in 2011, built it to a 50-person team, then crossed the Pacific to co-build Workstream with Desmond Lim and Lei Xu after a 100-interview discovery sprint revealed that hiring hourly workers was a massive unsolved problem. Today, Workstream serves 4,000+ businesses across 24,000 locations, has raised $118 million, and is deploying AI tools - including VoiceAI - to compress hiring cycles from weeks to hours for restaurants, franchises, and deskless-workforce employers.
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.
Ryan Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Assembled, the AI-powered customer support platform trusted by Stripe, Robinhood, and Etsy. A former machine learning engineer at Stripe (employee #80), he co-founded Assembled in 2018 with his brother John Wang and Brian Sze after observing how hard it was to run exceptional support at scale. Assembled has raised $70.7M, including a $51M Series B led by NEA, and now manages contact centers with up to 20,000 agents across chat, email, voice, and workforce management.
Shreesha Ramdas is the CEO and Co-Founder of Lumber (LumberFi Inc.), an AI-first construction workforce management platform that automates payroll, time tracking, HR, safety, and compliance for specialty contractors. A serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Strikedeck (acquired by Medallia) and LeadFormix (acquired by SAP/CallidusCloud), Ramdas deliberately pivoted from serving Silicon Valley to digitizing one of the most labor-intensive and underserved industries in America. Under his leadership, Lumber raised $21M in total funding, acquired BuilderFax, and is building autonomous AI agents to handle everything from prevailing wage audits to paper timecard digitization.
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.
Tiago Paiva is the founder and CEO of Talkdesk, the AI-powered cloud contact center platform he built from a 10-day hackathon project in 2011 into a $10 billion enterprise unicorn. Born in Portugal and trained as an engineer at Instituto Superior Técnico, he packed his bags for San Francisco two weeks after winning a Twilio hackathon and never looked back. Under his leadership, Talkdesk has grown to over 2,000 employees in 16 countries, posting $420M in ARR, and pioneering agentic AI across the entire contact center stack.
Vasili Triant is the CEO of UJET, an AI-powered cloud contact center platform backed by $183M in funding and built on Google Cloud. With over 20 years spanning Cisco, Serenova, LiveOps, and ShoreTel, he has navigated virtually every inflection point in enterprise communications - from on-premise PBX to cloud-native AI. Appointed sole CEO in April 2025 after serving as CBO, COO, and Co-CEO, Triant now leads UJET's push to reshape customer experience with agentic AI orchestration, deep CRM integration, and a mobile-first architecture that treats the smartphone as the default CX channel.
Wei Deng is the CEO and founder of Clipboard Health, a San Francisco-based healthcare labor marketplace that connects nurses and other healthcare professionals with open shifts at facilities like nursing homes and hospitals. Founded in 2016 and backed by Sequoia Capital and IVP, the company achieved unicorn status at a $1.3B valuation after raising $94M in total funding. A Yale College and Yale Law School graduate, Deng pivoted through six to eight business models before discovering that flexible, on-demand shift matching was the key to solving healthcare staffing shortages. Known for her relentless persistence — she pitched facilities seven months pregnant — Deng built Clipboard Health into a platform serving over 5,000 facilities across the United States.
Dave Rhodes is the Chief Executive Officer of Verint, the AI-driven customer experience automation company formed through the combination of Verint and Calabrio under Thoma Bravo. A career software executive, Rhodes spent 11 years at Autodesk as VP of the Americas before joining Unity Software as Chief Revenue Officer — where he scaled revenue from $130M to $600M — and later as SVP/GM of the Digital Twins business. He then served as CEO of Sauce Labs and CEO of Calabrio before taking the Verint helm in February 2026, leading one of the largest CX data sets in the world spanning workforce engagement, agentic AI, and customer analytics.
YouShift is building the operating system for hospital workforce management - an AI-powered platform that automates shift scheduling, swap management, and compliance tracking for healthcare teams. Founded by three Harvard alumni, the company targets the massive inefficiency in hospital staffing: full-time administrators juggling spreadsheets, chaotic last-minute coverage, and staff burnout from unfair schedules. With 1,000+ doctors already on the platform across Europe and the US, YouShift is turning hospital scheduling from a daily fire-fight into a background process - so clinicians can focus on patients, not paperwork.