Hiring Platform Workstream Lands $48M In Series B

Hiring platform Workstream has raised $48 million in a Series B funding round, the company announced Thursday (Aug. 26) in a press release.

The San Francisco company said in the release it will use the capital to double the size of its team, hiring for sales, marketing and engineering positions.

“When it comes to hiring platforms, local businesses and deskless workers have largely been overlooked, which is why we started Workstream,” Desmond Lim, co-founder and CEO of Workstream, said in the release. “We set out to give local businesses the tools they need to hire hourly workers faster, and we are humbled by the momentum and results our customers have seen.”

Founded in 2017, Workstream endeavors to “give the deskless workforce a better hiring experience,” the release stated. Its text recruiting platform automates sourcing, screening and onboarding, saving hiring managers 70 percent of their time on hiring. Its 1,500 customers include Chick-fil-A, Jimmy Johns and Wingstop franchises.

The funding round brings total investment in Workstream to $60.5 million and was led by BOND and Coatue, with reinvestment from Founders Fund. Some notable investors were on board for this series, including Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom; Tony Xu, CEO of DoorDash; Ryan Smith, CEO of Qualtrics; Frederic Kerrest, Chief Operating Officer of Okta; Basis Set Ventures; CRV; Peterson Ventures; GGV Capital; Jay-Z’s Roc Nation; Will Smith’s Dreamers VC and others.

“More than one-third of local businesses have open roles they haven’t been able to fill for at least three months,” said Coatue Ventures Chairman Dan Rose in the release. “We’ve all seen the ‘now hiring’ signs in their windows. Workstream is solving this problem for both businesses and job seekers.”

Workstream’s announcement comes at a time when businesses are still struggling to find workers. Figures released Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that new jobless claims rose by 4,000 for the week ending Aug. 21, for a total of 353,000.

Read more: New Jobless Claims Inch Up As Delta Soars And Labor Shortage Continues

Those figures were slightly higher than analyst forecasts of 350,000 and marked the first time in five weeks the numbers rose rather than shrank.