Today, I’m excited to announce that Skillit has raised $8.5M in additional funding co-led by Rafi Syed of Bow Capital and Zach Aarons and Zak Schwarzman of MetaProp with participation from existing investors Jesse Devitte and Travis Connors of Building Ventures (🙏).

Commercial Observer covered the announcement here.

The U.S. is undergoing the greatest reindustrialization process in its history building out infrastructure, factories, pipelines, roads and bridges faster than we did during World War II. Add to this the massive demand for solar farms, chip plants and the electrification and decarbonization of our real estate industry, and America once again has the opportunity to show the world what it means to be a great builder.

However, the industry faces a chronic and growing skilled labor shortage and is struggling to source, hire and retain great talent. We believe this is because the industry has been forced to operate in the dark for decades without any data on a craft worker’s hard and soft skills, experience, pay expectations, career motivations and more.

🚀 Data is power, and by fully digitizing skilled workers and building the world’s first data-driven craft labor recruiting tool, Skillit is empowering construction companies for the very first time with unparalleled access to a rapidly-growing network of the nation’s best craft workers and a suite of tools designed especially to make craft recruitment radically easier, faster and smarter for their recruiting teams.

We’ve made tremendous progress since announcing our Seed Round just five months ago:

  • We continue to build a world-class leadership team adding engineering leader Jesse Chan-Norris as Head of Engineering.
  • Our product achieved impressive hiring outcomes for our customers including 5X more qualified candidates, 3X higher interview attendance rates and 2X better retention rates.
  • 65% of Top ENR and 75% of mid-market contractors in our pipeline are converting to paying customers. New customers include Mortenson, Volumetric Building Companies, Bolster, McAfee and many others yet to be announced.
  • Sales cycles are getting faster, down from 90 days to 50 days on average.
  • Total worker members grew 460% with 16 new trades coming online including Electricians, HVAC Technicians and Heavy Equipment Operators.
  • We expanded into 32 new cities including New York, NY, Dayton, OH, Columbus, OH, Cincinnati, OH,  San Francisco, CA, Sacramento, CA and San Jose, CA.

This latest funding enables us to rapidly expand our product, engineering, sales and marketing teams and continue supporting more customers in new regions.

Our vision is to make skilled labor one of the greatest assets on Earth. Join our team and help shape the future of the world’s skilled workforce and built environment.