Traba – a leading marketplace platform for light industrial staffing – recently announced a $22 million funding round led by Founders Fund, with a sizable increase in valuation from last year. The funding round – which includes participation from returning investor Khosla Ventures – comes at a time of robust growth and customer adoption for the company.
Launched in 2021, Traba serves tens of thousands of workers and hundreds of businesses in distribution centers, warehouses, food processing facilities, manufacturers, and similar spaces across the country.
The company will use the funding round to accelerate expansion into new regions and add more product features to its marketplace platform that connects light industrial businesses looking for temporary staffing with workers who want to pick up shifts. And using machine learning, third-party data integrations, artificial intelligence robo-calling, and granular role attributes, Traba streamlines backend processes and algorithmically matches workers with their ideal shifts. Through features like instant pay, work history, reliability ratings, company reviews, and preferential restaffing, Traba creates a better experience for workers and businesses.
Despite around 14,000 temporary staffing companies operating in the U.S. alone, the light industrial market struggles with fill rates due to a reliance on outdated and inefficient processes such as paper timesheets and archaic job posting boards. And as a result, warehouses and distribution centers often have to take unnecessary risks to ensure adequate staffing such as requesting double the number of workers they need to account for abysmal fill rates and long lead times. And the industry average fill rate is only 46% and it takes approximately seven days to complete each request. As a comparison, Traba has a 99% fill rate with an average time-to-fill of less than one day.
With Traba, businesses can make staffing requests in near real-time with the confidence that they’ll get exactly the number of well-qualified workers they need. For workers, having an ongoing record of their job history, reliability, and on-time rating enables the best candidates to rise to the top of the list for the best shifts and wages. And the average pay on Traba is higher than minimum wage, enabled by the increased efficiency of the platform.
This funding round brings Traba’s total raised to date to $43.6 million.
KEY QUOTES:
“Traba is poised for extraordinary success. The company has quadrupled their revenue over the past year and is still accelerating growth every quarter. We almost never see companies sustain this speed of customer adoption while simultaneously expanding contribution margins. The high performance culture of Traba is equally rare and tracks the iconic companies at our roots. As a result, Founders Fund is thrilled to kick off FF8 with a signature investment in Traba.”
— Keith Rabois, General Partner at Founders Fund
“Our mission at Traba is to empower both businesses and workers to reach their full productivity and potential, which is why we’re excited to accelerate our growth with this new funding. We’re proud to see how our values of dreaming big, having an Olympian’s work ethic, maintaining a growth mindset, and being customer-obsessed have led to solid market traction. We look forward to the next phase of our journey.”
— Traba CEO and co-founder Mike Shebat
