Vardhan Kapoor scaled operations at Deliveroo and helped take Remitly public. Then he walked away to fix something quieter: getting frontline workers hired, compliant, and onto the job without weeks of paperwork.
Most software gets built for the people who build software. Desks, laptops, dual monitors, a calendar full of meetings. Vardhan Kapoor spent a decade working somewhere else entirely - inside the operations of companies where the workforce is on a scooter, in a warehouse, behind a counter, or on a ship. That is where he found the problem he now spends every day on.
FirstWork, the company Kapoor co-founded in 2024 and runs as CEO, has a deceptively simple pitch: it is an all-in-one HR and compliance platform for frontline workers. Shorthand version, borrowed from a company most founders admire, is "Rippling for seasonal workers." The company went through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch and raised a $5 million seed round in early 2025. But the numbers are the easy part of the story. The interesting part is why a person with his resume chose this particular fight.
Before FirstWork, Kapoor was Head of Region for APAC at Remitly, the cross-border payments company that trades on the NASDAQ. His job there was expansion: launching and scaling the business across more than five geographies in Asia. By his own account and the public record, he built that regional business up toward the high eight figures in annual recurring revenue, close to $100 million. He was part of the effort that carried Remitly through its public offering.
One detail from those years tells you a lot about the kind of operator he is. At Remitly, he helped launch a program for seafarers - one of the most mobile, hard-to-reach groups of essential workers anywhere. These are people who cross oceans for months, who need to move money home, and who almost never fit neatly into any system designed for an office worker. Serving them well is an operations problem, a compliance problem, and a trust problem all at once. Kapoor kept ending up in exactly those rooms.
Before Remitly came Deliveroo, where he led strategy and operations during the food-delivery giant's hypergrowth era. If Remitly taught him to scale a regulated business, Deliveroo taught him to scale sheer velocity - thousands of riders, constant turnover, a workforce that changes shape by the week.
Put those two experiences side by side and a pattern emerges. High turnover. Heavy compliance. Workers who don't sit at desks. Systems that were never designed for any of it. Kapoor didn't read about this problem in a market-sizing deck. He lived inside it, twice, across two of the most operationally intense consumer companies of the last decade.
Here is the thing about hiring a seasonal or frontline worker. The expensive part is rarely finding them. It is the stretch between "yes, I'll take the job" and "I'm actually productive." In high-turnover industries, that gap is a maze of credential checks, document uploads, background verifications, and compliance sign-offs - often handled across a scatter of disconnected tools and inboxes. Every day a hire spends waiting is a day of lost output, and in industries with thin margins and huge headcounts, those days add up fast.
FirstWork's answer is to automate the maze. The platform leans on optical character recognition and intelligent process automation to verify credentials, plus AI to handle the messaging and activation that keep a new hire moving. Compliance is not treated as a one-time gate but as something continuous - documents that expire get tracked, records get updated, and reports get generated without someone manually chasing them. The company's headline claim is that this cuts onboarding time by more than 75 percent.
The target market is deliberately unglamorous: transport, logistics, warehousing, delivery, hospitality, and the call-center world. These are the industries that keep the physical economy running and that, by most estimates, employ roughly 80 percent of the global workforce. They are also the industries the Valley has spent years politely ignoring in favor of building yet another tool for knowledge workers.
Kapoor did not pick this problem alone. His co-founder and FirstWork's CTO, Shubham Choudhary, came at it from the infrastructure side. Choudhary built core global-employment infrastructure at Rippling, work that helped open market entry across dozens of countries, and later ran engineering for a suite of products at Deel. He holds multiple US patents. If Kapoor spent his career on the operations side of the frontline-worker problem, Choudhary spent his on the plumbing beneath it.
That pairing is part of why investors leaned in. The $5 million seed, closed in February 2025, was led by Gradient, with Y Combinator, SOMA Capital, 468 Capital, Houghton Street Ventures and a set of operators from the world of global employment participating. Gradient's partner on the deal described the company's potential to become "a category-defining company" on the strength of its AI-driven approach. When a founder has personally lived the pain a product solves, you tend to feel it in the details - and investors tend to notice.
There is a quieter line in Kapoor's history that is easy to skip past. In 2019, a proposal he wrote - a business book on the impact of technology on society - was shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize, an award for the best business-book proposal by an author under 35. He had the idea, the framing, and enough of it to catch a global jury's attention.
He didn't write the book. He went and built the thing instead. For a certain kind of founder, that is the whole personality in one anecdote: given the choice between describing how technology should reshape the working world and actually shipping a piece of it, he chose to ship. The essay became a company.
The most reliable signal in early-stage building is not the size of the market or the polish of the pitch. It is whether the founder picked a problem they actually understand in their bones. Kapoor's whole trajectory - Deliveroo's velocity, Remitly's regulated scale, the seafarers who fit no template - reads like a decade-long apprenticeship in exactly the mess FirstWork is trying to clean up.
He has been candid, in his contributions to the Forbes Human Resources Council and elsewhere, that the systems most companies rely on were simply never fit for purpose when it comes to frontline teams. Outdated tools create bottlenecks, and the workers on the receiving end are the ones left disadvantaged. FirstWork is his attempt to build HR infrastructure that is, in his framing, actually fit for purpose.
What is genuinely worth stealing from Kapoor's path is the discipline of it. He did not chase the loudest, most fundable idea. He worked adjacent to a hard, unglamorous problem for years, built the operating scars to understand it, paired with someone who had the technical scars to match, and only then went and built. There is a version of ambition that is all noise and a version that is all patience. His looks like the second kind.
FirstWork is still early. The frontline HR market is fragmented and stubborn, and 80 percent of the workforce is a target big enough to attract plenty of competition. But if there is a founder you would want pointed at the messy, regulated, high-turnover world of frontline work, it is probably the one who has already spent a decade there and came back for more.