WorkTorch, formerly known as QuickHire, announced today that it has closed a $2.2 million seed round led by Tenzing Capital. Along with the salary increase comes a name change that aims to reflect the business’ focus on employee recruitment and retention.
Speaking to TechCrunch, the co-founders, sisters Deborah Gladney and Angela Muhwezi-Hall, said the rebrand was a year and a half in the making because they recognized the shift between employees and employers.
“Finding the right talent is half the battle,” Gladney said. “Where companies get hurt the most is losing people faster than they get in the door.”
Those businesses realized that if they did nothing to help companies find the right talent, their efforts would be fruitless keep it up Those workers.
“We started supporting what’s happening with people after hire and started focusing on career development and talent retention tools,” Gladney continued. “Hence our new name, WorkTorch. We want to be a guiding light for better work, a better workforce.”
The company, which launched last April, says it has a roster of more than 40,000 service industry applicants actively seeking employment, with at least 1,000 interviews scheduled across its platforms. As part of the rebrand, users now get a career development portal where they can track career progress and connect with others with similar interests.
At the same time, employers can now access new retention tools to view national and regional data trends, as well as receive feedback from their employees on their current work experience.
Investors were attracted to WorkTorch because of the changing American working environment. TechCrunch has previously reported that VCs remain bullish on human HR platforms despite the “great exodus.” In the first two months of 2022, investors poured more than $1.4 billion into the sector. This follows the workforce technology startup that raised over $12.3 billion last year.
Gladney said it took about six months to close WorkTorch’s seed round because the founders felt pressured by investors during the recession.
“It felt like a fight to get every check,” Gladney said. The highlight of this fundraiser was the return of most of their existing investors. Based in Kansas, Return Capital has helped the duo raise more than $1 million from a handful of black women in the Midwest. As two black women in Kansas, we are very proud of this.
Then there were the naturally lower valuations that investors felt they were getting along with – more than they took the last time they raised more than $1 million in funding. “I could hear people talking to us to check a box or feel like they were doing their part,” Gladney said.
Muhwezi-Hal says people make soft promises, do extensive due diligence and then back out, never really wanting to go into HR.
“It was very strange,” Muhwezi-Hal said. “Many of these individuals have social media focused on diversity and inclusion. We were excited to connect with them. But when push came to shove, it was just like everyone else—probably worse than the VCs who wouldn’t respond to our emails because they’d let us down and waste so much of our time.”
However, they overcame the bias and secured top investors such as Bloomberg Beta, MATH Venture Partners, Ruthless for Good Fund and Graham & Walker. Fresh Capital will help WorkTorch expand to many new cities, including Chicago, Denver, Dallas and Atlanta. The Hackett Group found earlier this year that spending on HR Tech is likely to increase by the end of the year. This is where Gladney and Muhwezi-Hall find their current trend.
“Employers need better tools and skills to meet the needs of their workforce, and service-industry professionals thrive when given opportunities to grow and grow their careers,” Josh Oding, founder of Tenzing Capital, told TechCrunch. “WorkTorch has figured out how to deliver value to employers, and professionals and the market are responding.”
“I was so impressed with Deborah and Angela and it was one of those magical first meetings where I knew right away that I wanted to invest,” Graham & Walker co-founder Leslie Feinzig told TechCrunch. “It was amazing to me that this team has such a deep understanding and respect for the service staff, which is rare on the start-up fields. And that translates to undeniable and unheard of metrics for a startup at this stage.
Going forward, Gladney and Muhwezi-Hall hope WorkTorch will be a platform for anyone looking to see what’s next for their careers. “That’s what makes us different,” Gladney said. “WorkTorch is encouraging people to pursue anything they love. And then we come alongside them to help them get there.
