Invest in Workrise

Workrise was founded in 2014 under the name RigUp as a marketplace for on-demand services and skilled labor in the energy industry. Since then, the company has changed its name to Workrise and broadened its reach to include wind, solar, commercial construction, and defense industries.

Workrise is disrupting a sector that’s been slow to adopt new technologies. Workrise’s goal is to revolutionize the industry, using technology to streamline everything from recruiting to payments. The company is focused on delivering quality outcomes for its workers and clients.

With an impending industry labor shortage and a generational workforce shift underway, Andreesen Horowitz believes there’s no better time for better software for the energy labor market. “The temporary nature of work (average job duration ranges from two weeks to six to 12 months), complexity, heterogeneity, specialized skills by job type, and the tendency to work for multiple operators across various geographies creates the perfect storm for a vertical labor marketplace.”

Before Workrise, contractors relied heavily on fragmented, offline agencies to help them find new roles, but these agencies have thrived on obfuscation, high fees, and a lack of visibility into the full opportunity set available for workers. Workrise stands alone in serving the energy labor market with much-needed technology and has oriented its marketplace to provide increasing returns to both sides.

Workrise offers trade workers access to training that equips them for energy and infrastructure jobs that are on the rise. 6+ million hours billed across 105+ service categories in 2019 with a 95% client satisfaction rate.

With its leading database of workers– along with their validated professional experiences and updated safety certifications—Workrise fundamentally allows for better matching of supply and demand, resulting in significantly improved time-to-hire and visibility for both the independent contractors searching for the right projects and the companies looking to fill jobs with higher quality personnel.

Workrise allows workers to get paid faster, access health insurance, accumulate reviews and build their reputation, and manage their up-to-date certifications all in one place.

Workrise hopes to reach 100,000 unique workers by 2023 and 1 million by 2030.

As part of its mission to lower the barriers to entry for workers and create pathways into sustainable careers, Workrise established the Elevate Foundation, which seeks community partnerships to reduce the unemployment and wage gap for Black Americans. The Elevate Foundation provides grant funding on a quarterly basis to non-profit organizations such as ForKids, an economic mobility program in Norfolk, Virginia, and HAUL, a workforce development and training program in Houston, Texas.

Industrial staffing firms small and large alike find themselves starting a new year in an environment of unprecedented demand and challenging candidate supply. With competition for workers fierce, those staffing firms that are best able to deliver a convenient and positive experience for both candidate and client, via a combination of technology and human touch, are most likely to retain and expand their market share in the coming year.

According to TechCrunch, Workrise’s gross revenue has tripled since 2018, going from just under $300 million to about $900 million to close out 2020.

The shift to clean energy and a redoubling of investment in infrastructure are opening up jobs that are desperately in need of filling.

Workrise placed more than 4,500 workers, or nearly a third of all its workers placed in 2020, in renewable-energy jobs in 2020. In total, it placed 8,000 unique workers in jobs in 2019, with 13% in renewables. That number jumped to 15,000 in 2020.

In August 2021, Workrise announced it is establishing a technology engineering center in Northern Ireland that will create 150+ jobs locally and support its continued international growth.

Workrise recently hired Allen Narcisse, who most recently served as Head of Market Strategy at Lyft, as its Chief Operating Officer (COO) to lead Workrise’s marketplace growth initiatives across the U.S.

Workrise was listed on Forbes’ Next Billion Dollar Startups in 2019.