When Liza Rodewald and her husband, an active-duty soldier for the U.S. Army, moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, near Fort Campbell, their fellow military spouses asked her: "How are you working?"
Rodewald, a software engineer, had founded her own software consulting company and worked remotely full time. That hasn't been an option for many military spouses — and with them potentially having to pick up and move annually or every few years, the unemployment rate for military spouses sits at roughly 21 percent, per the U.S. Department of Defense.
So, she and fellow military spouse Erica McManus decided to help mitigate this issue while also providing businesses a global cross-time-zone remote work force. The pair founded Instant Teams in 2016, a company and talent marketplace platform that focuses on training military spouses and pairing them with companies to work as customer service representatives. The company is based out of Southern Pines, where Rodewald and her husband live as he is employed at Fort Liberty.
"Military spouses are located all over the globe in every time zone," Rodewald said. "So we can stand up teams of U.S. citizens for companies 24/7 without anybody having to work night shift or split the shifts. ... There's not a lot of other companies that can do that and deploy that."
Rodewald said that Instant Teams works with 30 companies that are mainly Fortune 100 firms, and that Instant Teams has 500 employees across the globe with more than 50,000 military spouses in the talent pipeline looking for roles. She said that military spouses "are great with our customers' customers because they've had all kinds of experiences and speak all kinds of different languages."
The company has raised more than $16 million in venture capital so far, according to Rodewald. Investors include Tiger Global, Squadra Venture, Frontier Capital and others.
In 2023, Instant Teams launched 12M+, an app designed to help military spouses across connect with each other. The company also opened a kid-friendly coworking space for military spouses in downtown Southern Pines to help foster community.
Rodewald said the coworking space in Southern Pines is a "pilot" and that she wants to "open one of these outside of every major military installation" nationwide. She said roughly 200 spouses have come to the coworking space per month since it opened.
"I have a playbook for it," she said. "I put it in downtown Southern Pines for a reason instead of on a military installation because spouses want their own place to go. We have a recruiter on site, so if somebody wants to talk about job opportunities, they can here. But it's more meant to be a connection point for the spouses here and for the community."
Ben Tobin covers real estate and economic development in the Greater Triangle, focusing on the counties outside Wake and Durham. Have a tip? Reach him at btobin@bizjournals.com or (919) 327-1012.
