Landed, a San Francisco, CA-based developer of an end-to-end recruiting workers platform to help restaurants and hospitality employers hire candidates. The company’s conversational AI technology connects candidates to employers based on each employer’s custom criteria, screening candidates based on data points, enabling employers to hire better candidates faster.
Landed was funded $7 million in the round led by Javelin Venture Partners and Blockchain Capital with support from Lightspeed Venture Partners, the angel investor, and founders of Warby Parker, Harry’s, the creators of celebrity chef José Andrés’ ThinkFood Group, and Allbirds’ Good Friends fund.
The funding will help fuel the aggressive development of Landed’s user base and new product offerings to provide end-to-end support for hiring at big diner and hospitality chains. Landed will even be adding new services for blue-collar employees on its platform to enable financial wellness, including fair and acceptable financial products such as earned wage access and crypto-enabled bank accounts.
The company was established in March 2020 by Vivian Wang, who watched her parents start as a dishwasher and waitresses at local Chinese restaurants and two decades later become software engineers.
Vivian Wang said she learned that blue-collar workers want to have a career and move up the ladder. Then she watched the gig economy, characterized by companies like Uber, Instacart, and Lyft, take off primarily by commoditizing labor. She felt like their methods were a bit short-sighted. Blue-collar workers want to earn skills.
The concept for Landed came when Wang was working for Gap Inc., advising the administrative team on corporate strategy connected to workforce management, where she saw firsthand the challenge that works turnover had for the brand and its operations. Their solution was to leverage mobile technology to reduce turnover rates in the stores while also providing long-term livelihood opportunities for workers.
In expansion, the company is developing financial products for its more than 150,000 employee users that, in the future, will have upskilling via certification and education programs.
Wang commented that the company was looking for partners, like Javelin, skilled at marketplaces, and Blockchain Capital, as Landed has plans to leverage some cryptocurrency technologies.
By: K. Tagura
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