A whirlwind of a year for Richmond startup Naborforce continues with the closing of a $2 million seed round.
The round, which closed on Tuesday, was led by Nashville-based Claritas Capital Partners. Naborforce founder Paige Wilson said Claritas' financial backing is an important step for the startup.
"We love a lot of things about [Claritas], and they are right there in the epicenter of health care," she said. "We are not a health care company, but we are certainly adjacent to it, and anybody on the health care side knows what we’re doing is absolutely impacting health care outcomes."
Wilson founded Naborforce in 2018 to connect aging adults to a network of "Nabors" for social engagement and on-demand support with errands, transportation and help around the house.
She said the funding will be used primarily to continue building out Naborforce's team, investing even more into its tech platform and continued expansion.
"We’re looking to end the year with six markets. We’re in three now, with plans for another six next year," she said.
The startup expanded operations to Raleigh in March, a move that was originally planned for 2020 but was postponed because of the pandemic. Wilson said the decision to expand into Raleigh first had to do with market fit. Raleigh is about the same size as Richmond with similar demographics, age-dependence ratios, volunteerism ratios and income, she said.
"Raleigh is going great ... Our client acquisition numbers have exceeded our expectations," she said. "We had in-bound calls from people in Chapel Hill and Durham, so we tucked those into that region, as well."
Wilson said this time last year, as the pandemic forced the startup to halt all in-person operations, she would have never expected all that's happened in 2021. Covid, she said, ended up being the catalyst for much of Naborforce's current success.
"If we’d talked a year ago, I’d have been crying the blues. This is what we’re meant to do, and we couldn’t do it during Covid, but Covid was an accelerant to the business," she said.
