We recently announced our $2.3 million seed round on TechCrunch today. We have the privilege to work with amazing investors to see our mission of enabling the industrial workforce to perform to their highest potential through. We raised this round last year, but the reason why we wanted to announce it today was to showcase the path we took to adjust to the market needs of the front line workforce. 

We originally started off solving problems by building software that optimized a factory's process, similar to what an MRP does. However, we soon realized that the way to improve productivity was not to streamline the process but to maximize the employees that execute the process. To do this, we knew we had to figure the best way to support and empower employees. 

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There were three distinct problems we saw:

1. Frontline employees are underutilized as a crucial resource. 

 It is difficult to predict or manage how many employees with what skills can be assigned to the day's workload. In the climate of COVID-19, this is more apparent than ever as businesses experience mass absenteeism. 

2. Automation is creating a wider skills gap.

• Skills gap is widening; around 80% of industrial sectors reported a moderate or severe shortage of workers. 
• Turnover rates are now 20-30% in manufacturing, which introduces variabilities and disruption in operations/production. And training new employees cost an avg of $3000 to train, and $1500 to retrain each year. 
• Avg age of skilled workers in the manufacturing and industrial sectors is 56 with a negative rate of replacement, which is already causing a shortage of 875,000 workers just in the US. 

Source: http://www.themanufacturinginstitute.org/Research/Skills-and-Training-Study/Skills-and-Training-Study.aspx

3. Information & communication is unstructured, which creates inaccessible tribal knowledge.

There are numerous amount of tools that help foster communication, but with more communication creates more unstructured data that create information silos within each individual. 

Around 80% of the global workforce is deskless and on the front line, in industries such as Agriculture, Education, Healthcare, Retail, Hospitality, Manufacturing, Transportation, and Construction, accounting for 2.7 billion workers worldwide. 

The main front line employee that has to deal with these challenges today is the Continuous Improvement Manager. A big part of their job is to collaborate with key stakeholders to lead projects and kaizen events by deploying structured problem solving to improve processes and eliminate waste, while training and engaging employees to be part of the continuous improvement cause. 

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So we created WorkClout to help make their jobs easier:

WorkClout is a mobile & web application that helps industrial, blue-collar workers perform better by centralizing corrective & preventive actions, tasks, on-the-job work instructions, skills training, workforce scheduling, & communication.

We want to be the best workforce management and support tool for frontline workers. And to give CI leaders the tools to modernize industrial labor processes and help make processes that are critical to safety, performance, and training more streamlined & centralized.

Spider Capital led this round, with participation from Y Combinator, Liquid 2, Soma Capital, Pioneer Fund, Mehta Ventures, Magic Fund, Oyster Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, Jude Gomila, Kevin Mahaffey, Alan Rutledge, Yuri Sagalov, Frank Zhang, Jonathan Downey, Jan Senderek, Ben Max Rubinstein, Andy Lam and more.

We will be focusing our efforts and resources to support manufacturers and other industrial sectors during this COVID19 pandemic to help with business continuity and worker safety. 

You can read more about how we're trying to help here: Our response to Covid-19