🔥 17 Startups Reinventing Work

🏈 Teams-as-a-Service, Talent Matching and Fractional Hiring

A big problem for companies is a) finding the talent b) assessing skills (both a bandwidth/time/cost and competence issue. Some successful startups have taken it upon them to do this, and then apply some mix of manual and AI-driven matching mechanism to provide talent.

PitchMe - Instead of following the usual route, this startup turns things around and allows candidates to a) take a skill-assessment b) choose their desired options for job opportunities c) get companies to pitch their roles directly. From the company’s point of view, they are able to understand and compare candidates better. The key is that each profile is anonymous at the beginning, which helps remove discriminations and focus on skills.

Lemon.io - Focusing on developers (vertical marketplaces are now the new normal, as we’re going through a phase of ‘unbundling’. Another example is BrutonLabs - the equivalent for Data Science teams) the platform promises to solve all-things related to hiring but also then managing this on-demand workforce, providing also task-management and project management support after the matching phase.

TurtleOS takes a spin on this but more aimed at ‘fractional’ hiring of developers.

We can all agree on the hiring-process being broken: manual, biased, heterogeneous, costly, time-consuming and so on. Using AI is an obvious solution to some of these problems, but it creates a well-known new one: un-explainability and bias (in a nutshell: AI is known to be a ‘black box’ - you just know the input and output, not why it makes decisions; AI is trained on large sets of available data, but that usually includes race, gender and many other human-driven biases).

Some startups are trying to tackle this problem, by providing more white-box AI, like yet-to-launch Before.ai and HiredScore - which also tries to bake alerts and messages like these to HR:

👋 Collaboration and Virtual Offices

We’re not going back to pre-pandemic lifestyles for many aspects, including work. The rise of virtual-office startups has been widely covered (great piece on ‘The Race to Fix Virtual Meetings on NY Times) with many high-funded startups like Teamflow, Gather, Kosy, Kumospace, and Plutowhich which built their virtual offices where teammates can “move around a digital space to recreate the water-cooler conversations common to physical offices” and some like Remotion that have taken a less invasive/light-weight approach to focus on ‘side-by-side’ collaboration. Some, like the yet-to-launch Wove, are trying to look for white space and potentially address (like we talked about for marketplaces) vertical/specific targets, i.e. supply-chain workers.

Another interesting take is by Cafè (YC backed) which focuses on the social aspect of bringing people together, with themed-hubs and easy integration with top apps.

Platforms like KettleOS are looking to become one-stop-shop solutions to focus more on making hybrid work…well “work” (sorry, pun intended) by also including location booking, experiences and so on.

There’s also players like 28Muses - who are attempting to make this a full-blown service, by organizing interactive workshops to maximize creativity, lateral-thinking and so on.

💆‍♀️ Mental Health and Wellbeing

The pandemic has taken a toll on most of us, helping reach all-time highs in burnout and stress levels, in and outside of work-life. Many startups have found this as a problem to be solved, either with human-solutions (On-demand / online therapy marketplaces like Betterhelp - more classic approach, TalkSpace - slightly more modern) or technology backed ones, like:

WinningTemp - App that helps employers check-in with their employees ‘temperature’

Moone - Similar to WinningTemp, a way to rethink surveys for employees

HelloBetter - The ‘Udemy’ for psychological courses

Nilo-Health - Platform that allows mental health tracking and counseling for companies to their employees

Meditation is obviously another big area (one well covered by giants like Headspace) but includes some more low-touch approaches like Breathing.ai  - a browser extension that helps change screen colors, break-alerts and relaxing-sounds.

Great things are also happening in the motherhood space, with App players like The SnapBack providing post-partum assistance to new-mums.

🏅 Online Coaching

Last, but definitely not least - are coaching platforms. There’s a ton of LMS (learning management systems) behemoths like Degreed aimed at workforce upskilling and reskilling, but then there are a few more niche/one-to-one players that try and personalize and bring more human-centered components in the mix. Namely, a few:

Sayge, Growthspace - online coaching platforms that get employees screened for their learning needs and then are matched on specific experts that will try to cater to those in some ‘packages’.

These are just a few - what have I missed? Mention your favorites in the comments! 👇