Austin startup Workrise, formerly known as RigUp, has landed a massive investment as it expands its focus beyond oil and gas to renewable energy and other infrastructure sectors.
The company announced May 20 a $300 million series E funding, bringing its total venture funding raised since its founding in 2014 to about $752 million. U.K.-based investment management firm Baillie Gifford led the latest round and Workrise also attracted a new investor in California-based investment firm Franklin Templeton.
The new investors join existing VC firms on the capitalization table, including Founders Fund, Bedrock Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Moore Strategic Ventures, 137 Ventures and Brookfield Growth Partners. TechCrunch reported that the funding gave Workrise a $2.9 billion valuation, and the company said it had a pre-money valuation of $2.6 billion.
With the new funding, Workrise plans to expand its corporate offices in Austin. It also has more than 600 employees across 25 offices, with half in the Texas capital. The company currently lists about 150 job openings online, with roughly 65 in Austin.
Workrise works with more than 500 companies across more than 70 metro areas.
Workrise's new investment represents a big endorsement of the company's new path, which its co-founders, CEO Xuan Yong and COO Mike Witte, describe as a "reimagining of skilled labor." Early in 2020, the company laid off about a quarter of its staff as the Covid-19 pandemic and shifts in oil and gas production jolted the industry.
Yong and Witte, who cut their salaries to minimum wage after the layoffs, in February 2021 rebranded the company as Workrise. While Workrise continues to build on the oil and gas skilled labor discovery and matching it was founded on, the new name seeks to broaden its reach into the future of the energy industry — renewables — as well as provide openings to facilitate skilled workers in other infrastructure sectors.
Workrise's platform as continued to attract new skilled workers. It had 8,000 unique workers in 2019, with about 13% in renewable energy work. Last year, it had about 15,000 workers on the platform, about a third of which landed renewable energy jobs. Overall, the platform's worker count was split about evenly across renewables, construction and oil and gas industires. It plans to place 100,000 workers in jobs across industries by the end of 2023.
"As we expanded our offering to more industries, we grasped that there are multiple transferable skills between these industries that neither the companies nor the workers could see," the founders wrote in a Medium post in February. "It clicked — we would retrain skilled laborers whose employment opportunities are on the wane for energy and infrastructure jobs on the rise. We would also retrain laborers for other areas of industry in which they have an interest and desire to work."
In 2019, when it was still called RigUp, the company achieved unicorn status with a valuation of more than $1 billion. Austin startups have increasingly been maturing into unicorn-stage valuations in the past year or so.
For example, earlier this month, Firefly Aerospace announced it had raised a $75 million series A round that valued it at more than $1 billion. In April, insurtech startup The Zebra raised a $150 million funding round, giving it a valuation north of $1 billion. Also in April, Arrive Logistics Inc. secured a $300 million funding, likely pushing its valuation into unicorn territory. Near the end of last year, digital health startup Everly Health, which operates Everlywell, also surpassed a $1 billion valuation. And, last year, Forbes named Austin-based logistics startup Shipwell as a company likely to achieve a billion-dollar valuation.
This story has been updated with additional information from Workrise.
