Gridwise, the Pittsburgh-based makers of the Gridwise: Gig-Driver Assistant app for Uber, Lyft and other contract workers, announced the close on a $12.7 million Series A as the startup looks to scale out its various services at a heightened and more rapid pace, a feat it'll look to accomplish via a tripling of its workforce over the next year. It also brings that startup's funding to $20 million so far since its launch in 2017 by co-founders Ryan Green, CEO, and Brian Finamore, CTO.
San Francisco-based seed-to-Series A investors Crosslink Capital Inc., which counted delivery platform Postmates among one of its dozens of portfolio companies before Uber acquired it in 2020, led Gridwise's most recent round. Other Bay Area firms that participated include Autotech Ventures, DoorDash angel syndicate DashAngles, Switch Ventures and Scribble Ventures. Gridwise also picked up investments from local firms 412 Venture Fund and Riverfront Ventures as well as Morgantown, West Virginia-based Mountain State Capital as part of its Series A funding round.
With the capital infusion, which Green said took the company about two months to raise, Gridwise plans to hire at least 40 additional workers over the next year in roles that include design, engineering, sales, product management and others. It currently employs 20 workers, almost all of whom work out of its Strip District headquarters.
"We're going to be rapidly growing, scaling up the team to support the kind of aggressive ambitions that we have for our growth," Green said. "In doing so, I think what's important for us is that we have some pretty exciting, new abilities that we'll introduce for drivers that enable them to further maximize their earnings, improve financial competency and just understand how to best manage their business through accessing worker benefits through financial tools for them, as well as other ways for them to maximize insights."
Contract workers who drive their vehicles for ride-hailing and delivery companies can use Gridwise's app to automatically have their earnings, expenses and miles tracked as they work. The app will also show them which places and times drivers in their area earn the most and even offer them suggestions on when they might most likely find work as the platform incorporates arriving airplane traffic at airports or nearby events that could draw large crowds. For those who work for multiple companies, users are able to track and compare their earnings instantly across these different services to see which ones are earning them the most, a measure that would otherwise need to be done manually and take a considerable amount of time to do for each service.
But Gridwise isn't just in the business of servicing gig workers.
The startup launched Gridwise Analytics last year, which taps into the data it gathers from its users to see the ebb and flow of the supply and demand of goods on an intimately local level. Green said the market for this product includes real estate developers, investors, municipalities, mobility service firms and retailers, among others, all of whom can then better understand various issues and make decisions around challenges like curb utilization, traffic congestion and infrastructure plans for example.
Gridwise Analytics earned the startup $1 million in revenue alone last year, though Green declined to disclose the company's exact revenue figures. He did disclose that it's several millions of dollars per year but less than $10 million. Green said Gridwise has seen a 400% increase in this revenue figure over the past year alone, a number he's chasing to hopefully at least meet if not beat this year.
As for the close of the funding round, Green said "it feels great."
"I mean, it's been a long road in terms of just all the ups and downs you go through, all the nos and doubts that are thrown your way over time," Green said. "So it's exciting to be at a point where we've been able to be talking about the direction we're going, the vision that we have for the platform and to be able to see that we've executed on that and have created what we said we were going to create, which is great."
