Wonolo raises $32 million in Series C financing led by Bain Capital Ventures to help businesses fill their immediate hourly or daily labor needs

Wonolo, the leading on-demand staffing platform startup that enables businesses to fill their immediate labor needs, has raised a $32 million Series C round to expand its team and accelerate growth to meet the nation’s high level of demand for a temporary staffing solution. The latest round was led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from new investor DAG Ventures and support from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Base10, AMN Healthcare, and Cendana. This brings its total funding to date to $60 million. In connection with the financing, Wonolo also announced that Bain Capital Ventures’ Jamison Hill has also joined its board of directors.

Founded in 2014 by AJ Brustein, Jeremy Burton, and Yong Kim, Wonolo is an on-demand staffing platform for businesses to fill their immediate hourly or daily labor needs. Its platform connects underemployed hourly workers with understaffed employers in retail, manufacturing, shipping and logistics, and other industries left behind by Silicon Valley’s future of work technologies.

This holiday season, employers in retail, delivery, warehousing, events, and many other industries are scrambling to meet their temporary staffing needs. According to the June 2018 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in 2018 the number of open positions in the United States exceeded the number of job seekers for the first time on record. At the same time, about 5 million Americans are underemployed, meaning they are seeking full-time work but receive fewer than 30 hours per week from their employer. Wonolo’s tech-forward approach offers the ideal solution to match the needs of employers and job seekers with a user-friendly mobile platform.

“Wonolo is reinventing the way people find hourly work. Their technology platform creates more flexibility for underemployed workers and fills hiring needs for understaffed companies insanely fast and at a disruptively lower cost,” said Jamison Hill, senior principal at Bain Capital Ventures and a member of Wonolo’s board. “We are excited to support the Wonolo team in pursuing their grand mission of bringing flexible and fulfilling work to everyone.”

Hourly workers in major markets across the country rely on Wonolo to find jobs that support their needs. There are now 300,000 users on Wonolo’s platform, which matches workers with thousands of brands using Wonolo for flexible staffing. Brands using Wonolo include Coca-Cola, Papa Johns, and Uniqlo.

In August, Wonolo launched a second headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee to expand the company’s reach even further. With this new financing, Wonolo will grow its staff – both in its two headquarters and in satellite offices across the country – and continue expanding to new local markets around the United States.

“When we founded Wonolo in 2014, we had a two-part goal of solving the underemployment epidemic for Americans while simultaneously eliminating the temporary staffing shortage large brands face,” said Yong Kim, CEO and co-founder at Wonolo. “Over the past four years, we have scaled our business model and built a thriving marketplace that connects hundreds of thousands of underemployed workers with the jobs they need. Bain Capital Ventures is providing us with the opportunity to put Wonolo’s technology into the hands of major Fortune 500 companies to help upend traditional staffing models.”

During the holidays, Wonolo makes filling extra seasonal shifts simple for brands while also empowering workers to find jobs where and when they need them. Creating a Wonolo posting is fast and easy: it takes a company just a few seconds to post a shift on the Wonolo marketplace, then jobs are filled in minutes, meaning companies can fill same-day or night shifts with a few simple clicks. Payment is automatically processed as soon as the job is complete, and employers can easily provide feedback for the Wonoloers they hire through an in-app review system.

Wonolo vets each worker before onboarding them onto the platform, and holds all Wonoloers to a high set of standards, which streamlines the job matching process and eliminates the need for a resume or interview. Wonoloers are qualified for a wide variety of jobs that are in high demand during the holidays, including warehouse fulfillment roles, stocking shelves, staffing events, and making deliveries.