- Wingspan announced it raised $14 million in funding. These are the details.
Wingspan – a payroll platform purpose-built for flexible workforces – announced it has raised a $14 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing its total capital raised to $23.5 million. And existing investors Distributed Ventures, Long Journey Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, and 186 Ventures also participated, as did founders of Warby Parker, Harry’s, Allbirds, TubeMogal, and Catalant. CEO Anthony Mironov and CTO Greg Franczyk, previously at Google Cloud and the Chief Architect at the Washington Post’s digital platform, founded Wingspan.
Wingspan plans to use the capital to expand its team as well as invest in its platform, which is already relied upon to pay and extend benefits for tens of thousands of independent contractors.
One out of every three people in the American labor force is an independent contractor, and their work contributes more than a trillion dollars a year to GDP, according to a 2022 study. And despite this emerging new normal, there is no system of record to integrate these legions of workers with the businesses that rely on them. This dynamic puts a wasteful administrative burden on contractors and companies alike — for managing episodic payments, accessing benefits, and wrangling 1099 tax issues — in a world that still seems to operate around a biweekly paycheck.
Launched in 2019 to remove the barriers that come with working for oneself, Wingspan accelerates payments and allows companies to work with contractors at scale. And Wingspan is an all-in-one, scalable solution for companies to onboard, pay, and support contractors effortlessly. Plus it typically saves companies $240 per contractor and 10 hours in time per week. With over 20,000 members and hundreds of enterprise clients, Wingspan is expected to surpass one billion in contractor payments by the end of the year.
KEY QUOTES:
“The future of work is already here. And Wingspan has built the financial infrastructure to better enable it.”
“The Wingspan team truly understands the myriad issues facing companies and independent contractors when it comes to timely payments and benefits accessibility. We are proud to be investors in Wingspan as they use this round of capital to rapidly scale the business to meet the needs demanded by today’s workplace.”
— Andreessen Horowitz General Partner David Ulevitch, who has joined Wingspan’s Board of Directors
“More and more companies rely on independent contractors to sustain and grow their businesses, but managing payroll and benefits for them is rife with challenges and headaches for both parties. Though much has been written about the future of work, actually supporting it requires a paradigm shift in how companies efficiently engage with independent contractors at scale. The shift toward a freelance economy was intended to minimize overhead and maximize flexibility, but it has also ended up creating an administrative crisis. We built Wingspan to catch up with the Zeitgeist.”
— Wingspan co-founder and CEO Anthony Mironov, whose previous experience in private equity was deeply rooted in payroll and benefits
“Our partnership with Wingspan has been transformational. Previously, our workflow for managing contractors fell short of our vision, with an inefficient process that required cobbling together multiple systems. Wingspan has become the critical workflow engine to streamline the process for fast payments and efficient onboarding of contractors, which is a competitive advantage in today’s changing labor market.”
— Lisa Zeeveld, CFO at BELAY Solutions, a 100% remote, leading virtual staffing solutions company that works with more than 6,000 people
