Workforce management solution provider, Deputy recently announced it has received US$25 million in Series A financing from OpenView. This funding marks the company’s first from an institutional investor in its eight year history and will be used to rapidly grow Deputy’s team across offices in Sydney, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Philippines.
In addition to the funding, Daniel Demmer, a Managing Partner at OpenView and former President of Endeca, will also join the board at Deputy.
“Our investment in Deputy marks the largest single investment OpenView has made in our decade-plus history,” said Mr Demmer.
“Co-founders Steve Shelley and Ashik Ahmed and the Deputy team have built a truly extraordinary platform that automates a broken and manual workflow for hundreds of thousands of users around the world. We’re looking forward to working with the team and realizing Deputy’s further growth potential in the coming years.”
Deputy will use its partnership with OpenView to further expand its team and platform, which until now has bootstrapped its way to rapid growth. The company hopes that with the support of OpenView, it will be able to scale efficiently to meet the needs of its growing customer base.
How did Deputy come to life?
Inspired by issues encountered running their previous business, its founders built Deputy to transform the archaic practice of employee time tracking and scheduling. The company now counts 28,000 businesses, large and small, as customers including Amazon, Qantas, Nike and NASA and gives users the ability to auto-optimize schedules by role, hours worked and more.
Deputy provides a modern mobile and cloud-first answer to out-dated scheduling systems, which have left employees and managers to rely on complicated Excel spreadsheets, phone calls and texts to manage schedule and shift changes.
“Workers have been left frustrated with countless hours wasted and less-than-optimal work schedules created by legacy tools,” said Mr Shelley.
“Shift workers comprise close to 60 per cent of the world’s labour force, yet the technology to serve these workers and their employers is unsuited to such a large and complicated task.
“For the last eight years, we have grown our company from an idea to a full-fledged business. Now with the support of OpenView, a firm that wholly shares our mission of improving people’s working lives, we will be able to accelerate the product roadmap, new products and supercharge the go to market plan. This will mean many additional benefits for our customers worldwide to improve their working.”
Co-founder and CEO of Deputy, Ashik Ahmed notes the growth rate of casual labour force market in Deputy’s success.
“The hourly paid market grows at a rate of one million people per year in the U.S. alone and this is not about to slow down with casualisation of the workforce, massive growth in hospitality, retail, senior living, on-demand services and other sectors,” he said.
