Homebase, a San Francisco-based administrative technology platform used by restaurants, retailers and other small businesses to manage their hourly worker teams, announced on Thursday a new $71 million Series C funding round — some of it from celebrity investors.
The infusion led by GGV Capital brings Homebase's funding to $109 million, with the new capital fueling an expansion of the platform's human resource and payroll services. Matthew McConaughey — bongo-playing romcom fixture, Academy Award winner and 2005's Sexiest Man Alive — is joining an investor cohort that includes pro athletes Jrue and Lauren Holiday, ex-DoorDash and now Gusto chief financial officer Mike Dinsdale and Khosla Ventures.
Since CEO John Waldmann founded the company in 2015, it's grown a customer base of more than 100,000 businesses (and their 1 million managed employees) and expanded its offices in San Francisco and Houston to branches in Atlanta, Austin, Denver and Toronto. In the early days of the March 2020 Covid lockdown, the company shared local data with my colleague Mark Calvey that painted a bleak picture of the economic freefall besetting San Francisco small businesses based on the plummeting use of its platform.
Homebase bills itself as the first all-in-one platform specifically for bars, restaurants, retailers and other small businesses to manage their hourly teams. Homebase's existing products cover time and attendance (syncing them to reduce mistakes), team communication, and hiring and human resources functions — the kinds of headache-inducing administrative functions that the company said can consume 30 hours per month for half of U.S. small businesses.
With the new funding, Homebase will expand its product suite to payroll processing and pay advances, making available to Homebase's small business client a perk popular with large corporations. Right now the general payroll service is limited to 27 states, but the company aims for availability in the rest of the U.S. and Canada in the near future.
"Hard working people who work in and run restaurants and local businesses are important to all of us. They play an important role in giving our cities a sense of livelihood, identity, and community," McConaughey said in a statement from Homebase regarding why he's invested.
Milwaukee Bucks player Jrue Holiday and his wife, two-time Olympic gold medalist Lauren Holiday, recently made news when their social impact fund awarded $1 million to Black-owned businesses and nonprofits, including 13 Milwaukee-area organizations.
The Jrue and Lauren Holiday Social Impact Fund began as Jrue Holiday's commitment to pledging the remainder of his 2020 NBA salary toward organizations combatting systemic racism. This is the second round of funding for the organization given to 25 Black-led nonprofits and 25 Black-owned businesses.
The grants focused on the four cities of Milwaukee, New Orleans, Indianapolis and Los Angeles, all where Holiday has personal and professional connections. For-profit organizations will receive up to $25,000 in matched grant funding, and nonprofits will receive $15,000 in direct unrestrictive grant funding.
