We’ve seen a boom in the last several years around tech built for front-line, service, manual, and other workforces typically paid on an hourly wage. In one of the latest developments, Hourly.io — which has built an app that tracks working hours, generates payroll, and then calculates and assigns workers compensation insurance to individuals based on that — has closed in on $27 million in funding.
Hourly.io is based out of the U.S. — Palo Alto to be exact — but it has strong Israeli roots in the form of co-founders Israel transplants Tom Sagi and Shay Litvak, and that is following through also in the VCs backing it. Glilot Capital Partners is leading the round, with S Capital (an Israeli fund headed by former partners of Sequoia), Vintage Investment Partners and J-Ventures also participating. S Capital also led Hourly’s $7.2 million seed round in 2019.
Hourly today has some 1,000 customers all in the state of California in areas like construction, home services, accounting and retail. It will be using the funding both to continue enhancing its product to target more verticals, and to expand to more markets: the plan is to be live also in Texas, Arizona and Nevada by 2023.
Hourly’s own birth came out of Sagi’s own experiences. When he initally moved to the U.S., his first work experience was to help out in his family’s construction firm, where he was tasked with any and all odd jobs relating to admin and more. One of those involved handling payroll, he told me.
“We had 30-40 hourly employees, and I helped with everything on the business side including HR,” he recalled. “Every Friday the workers were paid, so I spent every Thursday collecting time cards in the field.” Working out workers comp insurance and payouts, he added, was a mandatory aspect of that, given the labor work involved.
“It was a headache to deal with,” he said. “What really should have only taken minutes to do took at least a day.” That was the impetus for building a platform to automate the process, from tracking time worked through to calculating payment and workers comp based on that.
Hourly’s rise is part of a bigger shift we’ve seen in tech built for the world of work. For the longest time, a lot of the most interesting innovations have been focused on so-called “knowledge workers” — those who typically get salaries, use computers and desks, and might well be paid much higher overall.
Hourly workers, however, have come into focus more recently for a number of reasons. Perhaps the strongest of these has been the communications and productivity evolutions arising from the ubiquity of smartphones.
But there have been other changes. They’ve included a growing regard for this segment of the workforce (this one really stood out during the Covid-19 pandemic where front-line workers were seen for the essential role they play to show up for work to keep the …read more