- On-demand talent platform company Stoke announced it raised $4.5 million in funding to help companies access its talent pool of self-employed freelancers
Stoke — an on-demand talent platform company — announced it has raised $4.5 million to help companies access its growing talent pool of self-employed freelancers and contractors. The seed round of funding was led by TLV Partners with participation from Bogomil Balkansky (former VP Cloud Recruiting Solutions at Google), Flatiron Health founder Zach Weinberg, Boaz Chalamish (CEO of Clarizen), and several others.
“I’ve faced the challenge of locating and onboarding on-demand talent, both at a 20-person startup and during my stint at Google. Regardless of company size, hiring managers are wasting an inordinate amount of time sourcing and screening contractors, and then chasing statements of work, invoices and payments. That’s why I was excited to back Shahar and Hilik’s vision at Stoke, and be a part of solving this economy-wide problem,” said Balkansky.
It is important for fast growing companies to bring on the best pool of talent and they need to scale up quickly or bring on specialist talent with the skills or knowledge to perform a specific task thus ensuring the workforce matches the pace of business.
However, businesses struggling to fill key skills gap are discovering that talented candidates are not applying for full-time positions as they prefer the flexibility and freedom of freelance or contract work. The US workforce dramatically shifted towards freelance work over the past decade. For example, more than half of the total workforce at Google are freelancers, contractors, and outsourced workers.
“I am seeing a fundamental shift in the industry where freelancers are growing to become more instrumental in helping companies grow and adapt quickly,” added Weinberg. “However, managing that part of the workforce is a daily challenge. Varying invoice systems, payment cycles, compliance issues; most companies are still not set up to handle the realities of today’s employment landscape. As a founder and investor, I see this trend continuing, which is why I was so quick to invest with Stoke,” added Weinberg.
Online marketplaces for freelancers are help to find talent, but they are generally aimed at consumer and ad-hoc markets rather than corporate use. For medium and large companies, the process of hiring and managing freelancers is haphazard, disorganized and difficult, and managed through a combination of email, Excel spreadsheets and scattered Word documents.
Shahar Erez and Hilik Paz had founded Stoke to solve these problems and to put companies on the fast track to an agile workforce. The two entrepreneurs had experience managing departments in large technology companies. As they worked together in senior positions in Mercury / HP, VMWare, and Microsoft showed them first-hand the challenges of hiring and managing a modern and flexible freelance workforce. And they interviewed more than a hundred CEOs and CFOs to understand the challenges they’re facing as the workforce changes.
“Shahar and Hilik’s strong entrepreneurial characteristics complement each other in solving a problem they’ve faced first-hand in their previous roles,” explained TLV Partners co-founder and managing partner Eitan Bek. “Stoke aims to enable businesses to leverage a talent cloud; to get the talent they need when they need it, across all business functions. As the growth of the flexible workforce continues, being able to leverage this talent cloud will play a fundamental role in the survival of businesses. We’re thrilled to lead Stoke’s seed round and look forward to our partnership with Shahar and Hilik as we jointly usher in the Future of Work.”
Stoke’s talent-on-demand platform will enable companies to find, hire, and manage freelancers at scale. And Stoke will provide organizations with a management platform for their existing external workforce as well as integrate with popular online freelancer marketplaces thus enabling Stoke users to search these sites in from Stoke’s own unified interface and easily on-board new people.
“The new generation who’ve entered the workforce in the past decade want a different contract with life; they want flexibility and ongoing self-development,” commented Erez. “Companies, meanwhile, are changing their operating models and becoming learning, evolving organizations. On-demand talent provides the scale, knowledge and flexibility these organizations require. Stoke will bridge the gap between enterprises and freelancers, providing a one-stop management platform for the Open Talent Economy.”
