Clocking In For Our Shift: Announcing Our Investment In Homebase
When John Waldmann, CEO of Homebase, told us about the earliest days of his company, he recounted walking door-to-door down University Avenue in Palo Alto, observing and learning how merchants managed their workforces. He was surprised when he discovered that nearly every local business did its workforce scheduling on paper, even though big chains like Starbucks and Subway have long been using enterprise-grade solutions like Kronos or Ultipro.
Store and restaurant managers (mind you, on probably the single most tech-savvy street in America) would sit down on Sunday nights, often for several hours, to assign employees to their shifts. Then, their employees would come into work just to take cellphone photos of the paper schedule or submit shift change requests on paper. There has to be a better way, John thought. This marked the birth of Homebase, a cloud-based employee scheduling and management solution that launched in 2015. And today, we’re honored to lead the company’s $20 million Series B round.
In the years since its humble beginnings, Homebase has achieved a lot. John recruited his talented co-founder and COO, Rushi Patel; they released the initial product; and the company has grown markedly from there to over a hundred thousand loyal merchants, deepening its scheduling features and launching time-tracking and messaging products. Today, Homebase is quickly emerging as the leading solution for local businesses to manage their employees.
We’ve been active investors in startups focusing on SMBs and local businesses, including Zenreach, Bevspot, and Justworks, which have had tremendous success in this segment. With that background, we were blown away by the results of Homebase’s product-driven focus on customer experience, as it has earned the engagement of local businesses without spending a dime on outbound sales. This approach has not only led to strong word of mouth distribution, but Homebase also enjoys impressive engagement, retention, and upsell metrics; even partners are more willing to invest in distributing its product, because they have confidence it will be an experience their user base will enjoy.
Over the years, Bain Capital Ventures has been fortunate to work with incredible teams at Taleo and Linkedin, which have transformed hiring for enterprise businesses. With the American economy nearing full employment, it is harder than ever for small merchants to find great talent, while workers in the local economy still lack a way to be recognized and rewarded for exceptional shift work.
Today, we’re proud to support Homebase in launching tools to make it simple, affordable, and time-effective for local businesses to post and manage job openings. Looking to the future, we are excited about the potential of this platform to help employers identify and hire not only workers who have historically been present and on-time, but even help fill in shifts and hours for underemployed workers with part-time schedules at other merchants.
We’re honored to clock in on this shift with John, Rushi, and the incredible Homebase team to help empower millions of local businesses across America.