BuildWithin: Helping to employ the unemployed

Editor’s note: At the start of the year, we look at which young companies have caught our eye for hitting a milestone, bringing in funding or growing its revenue base. This company has made our list of our Startups to Watch for 2023. See them all here.

Former D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and former D.C. Public Schools principal Ximena Hartsock have reunited again to be disrupters in education, this time in the workplace.

While still in stealth mode, Hartsock and Rhee have essentially built two different businesses that work together to help employ the unemployed, seeking to create a national apprenticeship model and address the U.S. labor shortage through their barely year-old startup, BuildWithin.

There’s the software-as-a-service side of the company, which sells a workforce management system to employers to facilitate and manage apprenticeship programs. That side is funded by $2.4 million in pre-seed funding led by Dundee Venture Capital, with participation from Atento Capital, Nubian Sage, The Good Impact Fund, angel investor Russel Gates and Black Capital, an early-stage fund focused on investing in underrepresented founders. They are backing a bit of a serial entrepreneur in Hartsock, who founded and grew her last company, Arlington advocacy software firm Phone2Action Inc., to more than 200 employees.

The other side of the business works more like a tech training bootcamp, both in person or online. It’s funded by a $7.9 million grant from the Department of Labor under President Joe Biden’s Apprenticeship Building America program to scale apprenticeship programs across the nation through innovation districts.

“The grants are separated from the SaaS company, but everything works together to increase the number of apprenticeships in the country,” said Hartsock, BuildWithin’s CEO. “To give people opportunity to have the better jobs, to give employers an opportunity to fill their vacancies with Americans and not outsource them.”

Through the grant with the Biden administration, BuildWithin is running a pilot to build apprenticeship innovation districts in D.C. and Fairfax County. In the District, it partnered with D.C.’s Department of Employment Services to run an eight-week tech accelerator and has already graduated a class of 80 residents. By the end of the hands-on-learning program, every participant acquired a CompTIA certification that prepares them for tech jobs in software development, IT help desks or project management at local companies.

This year, the plan is to expand the idea to the Bay Area — and perhaps raise an undisclosed seed round in the summer. “The idea is to put the sexy back on looking for a job and breaking into technology and make technology accessible to everyone,” Hartsock said.

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