Venture capital funding has been slower this year than what the industry experienced over the past few years, but that isn’t stopping one Denver startup from raising funds.
Opolis, a digital employment platform, closed a $6.6 million round today with plans to scale its operations. This raise valued Opolis at $50 million.
The company is built on blockchain technology (Ethereum and Polygon) and gives independent workers access to employment benefits. This includes payroll, legal support, insurance and other shared services, offerings that typically aren’t available to contractors or independent workers.
When users sign up for the platform, they also become members and owners of Opolis.
“The younger populations are going to be looking for more freedom and flexibility [with work], but don't really want to do it at the expense of [not] having decent health care insurance or having a retirement plan,” said John Paller, the executive steward of Opolis.
It’s not just younger people opting to become independent workers, either. According to a Forbes article referencing 2022 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 36 percent of U.S. employees are independent workers. That number could grow to more than half of the workforce by 2027.
Opolis plans to tap into this growing workforce and use its latest capital to further its reach in the U.S. and Canada. Opolis currently operates in 48 U.S. states but plans to expand into all 50 and Puerto Rico by the end of the year.
“Our goal is to go after this, call it 40 million people that are independently working and those that are entering that sphere over the next five years, and get to a place where we have market leadership for this new product category because it doesn’t really exist right now and we want to be the leaders of that,” said Paller, who has worked in the HR tech and employment realm for 23 years.
Before launching Opolis, Paller founded the staffing and recruiting firm Lakeshore Talent. He became interested in the tech startup world in 2012 and sold Lakeshore to his employees in 2017. Paller then went on to founded Opolis in August 2017, waiting four years before rolling out the digital employment platform to users.
Since launching, the startup has grown to 20 employees distributed across the globe. Paller said he plans to hire five to 10 people in the next 12 months.
Opolis is calling this $6.6 million round a bridge round between its seed raise and a future Series A round. The bridge round was led by European crypto investment firm Greenfield.
"We decided to do the bridge round now and delay the larger raise until we get our scaling engine fully operational,” Paller said, adding that he expects to raise a Series A within the next year.
The company has raised $13.3 million to date, including a $5.5 million seed round in 2021.
