Cincinnati-based tech company Upshift has raised a $3.7 million round of Series A funding from a group of investors that includes Recruit Holdings Ltd., the parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor.
Upshift offers an on-demand staffing platform. Unlike other gig-economy companies like Uber, Upshift hires people as employees. The company only accepts about 12% of applicants and those that make the cut receive benefits like workers' compensation insurance and payroll taxes.
Typically, temp agencies assign people to jobs. But Upshift allows its employees to choose what kind of work they want to do. Users can open the app, see what shifts are available and how much it will pay, then select the job they want to do.
Currently, Upshift has more than 20,000 employees in 15 cities. There are more than 1,000 companies on the Upshift platform, some of them Fortune 500 businesses.
Recruit Holdings led Upshift's $3.7 million round of funding. Columbus-based Rev1 Ventures and Boston-based Data Point Capital also participated.
Alex Pantich, Upshift's director of operations, told Cincy Inno that the company will use its fresh round of funding to continue building out the platform and expand into new cities.
"We've landed on a really good playbook and business model," Pantich said. "Now we're just focused on selling and scaling on that."
Ohio, he added, is currently Upshift's biggest state in terms of business and employees. The company plans to further expand throughout the Midwest and the South. Within the next year, Upshift hopes to build out teams in Florida, Georgia and Michigan.
Upshift has grown dramatically in just over three years. Pantich and his co-founders, Steve Anevski and Nikola Jordanovski, received $50,000 for participating in Brandery's 2016 cohort, an experience that Pantich said changed the course of their business.
"We basically went in there with a napkin," Pantich said. "It felt like we were the company that came in with the least, but they accepted us anyway. The whole thing was really good for our focus."
Pantich said that the company currently does not plan to raise another round of funding.
"We pride ourselves in being very capital efficient," he said. "This isn't Silicon Valley – we don't have doggy daycare. There's a very different and determined business mindset here."
Although Upshift plans to scale across the country, Pantich said the company will always call Cincinnati home.
"One thing we really like about Cincinnati is the humility of business owners here," Pantich said. "Almost everyone we reached out to try to learn from was happy to sit down with us and impart wisdom. I don't think that's the case in most cities, especially on the coasts."
