WorkPilots OY, the Finnish on-demand temporary work platform provider has raised €1m in a seed funding round including the Swedish corporate investor Thoren Tillväxt AB and Daniel Johnsson, a private investor and serial entrepreneur, with participation from previous investors. The purpose of the funding is to develop the job-matching service further in Finland to reach out to other selected European countries with implementing pilots based on the Finnish successes.
WorkPilots is a unique mobile and web job-matching service with a strong social impact focus on helping young people gain work experience and find temporary gigs. Its key success factor is the co-creation with local municipalities, NGOs, vocational education institutions and private enterprises.
“At the city of Tampere we are about to start an era of very courageous trials and WorkPilots is a really suitable solution, also for this.” says Petri Pekkola from employment services at the Municipality at the City of Tampere. Jenni Tuoresjärvi, specialist at the Tampere unemployment office continues, “Any kind of work experience improves your position in the labour market. With the help of WorkPilots, youngsters can get employed easier and even create long term employment relationships”.
Kaisa Heimonen, project coordinator at Ohjaamo in the city of Kotka says: “Our mission is to offer the youth, under 30 years old, opportunities for employment. We have started using and promoting WorkPilots and have been able to offer many local youths valuable work experience and received great feedback from this initiative. We are happy to share our own experiences on how we have promoted the solution to private companies and NGOs in our region to immediately benefit from the huge untapped resources of our youngsters”.
WorkPilots initially developed the job-matching platform from the demand of the municipalities who were experiencing high social costs relating to youth unemployment, but have since seen the interest increase from the private sector in a variety of industries, driven by the frustration over the slow and inefficient recruitment for short term tasks.
Sakari Pehkonen, CFO at Lähitapiola Capital Area, one of Finland’s largest life and pension insurance companies, points out: “We are starting cooperation with WorkPilots because we see it as an excellent way to give the youth work experience. WorkPilots is an excellent partner, because they are approaching this from the perspective of young people. The cooperation fits our strategy, of supporting a persons life from womb to grave, extremely well.”
Eija Kiviranta, CEO and Co-Founder of WorkPilots passionately explains the core motivation of starting the company: “Our purpose from the start has been to put the young people’s interest at the front and centre when we built our job-matching solution. We believe this is significantly different from many previous on-demand services that are focusing on providing the cheapest possible service for the employer, and often the respect and support for the person who will actually apply and perform the tasks are forgotten. We are convinced that the true win/win comes from treating workers fairly and supporting them in various ways.”
Investor Thoren Tillväxt’s Marcus Isaksson says: “As we are the investment side of ThorenGruppen, one of Sweden´s largest providers of vocational training, we deeply understand the challenges and importance of guiding our students into the work-place from internships to their first permanent jobs. We are extremely impressed by what WorkPilots have achieved in such a short time in Finland and its strong focus on empowering the individuals’ ability to enter the work-place by lowering the otherwise high barriers”.
Daniel Johnsson, the CEO and founder of Exertis CapTech, one of the Nordic’s largest distributor and configurator of electronics and technology, and now investor in this funding round says enthusiastically: “As an employer of hundreds of staff in Sweden, I have always been looking for the kind of easy on-demand recruitment that WorkPilots have created, with a simple and fast way of finding, hiring and evaluating both short and longer term staff. I’m very excited to be investing in WorkPilots to support its expansion”.
With this new funding, WorkPilots has raised a total of approximately €1.1M to date, in addition to support from TEKES (the government growth debt fund in Finland), with plans to complete a Series A-funding round during the course of 2018.
“Elevera has provided invaluable support to me and my co-founder at WorkPilots to help to prepare and secure additional growth funding through Elevera’s investor network and hands-on advice throughout the funding process. We would never have been able to reach and meet with such a vast amounts of qualified investors from VCs, to corporate investors and industry experienced angels. We are excited to have both secured this seed funding and also developed relationships for our future planned A-series round.” – Eija Kiviranta, CEO and co-founder of WorkPilots
For more information on WorkPilots, please visit: www.workpilots.fi
