Firstwork raises $15m to automate onboarding for frontline workers

Firstwork, a New York-based AI company that automates hiring checks for frontline staff, has raised $15m in a Series A round led by Earlybird Venture Capital.

Legion VC and Deel Ventures joined the round alongside existing investors Gradient and Y Combinator, the company said. The raise takes Firstwork’s total funding to $20m.

The company, founded in 2024 by Vardhan Kapoor and Shubham Choudhary (pictured), builds AI agents that sit on top of the HR, payroll and screening systems employers already use. According to Firstwork, its agents handle document verification, right-to-work and background checks, training coordination and follow-up with workers.

Firstwork said more than 150,000 frontline workers now start work through its platform each month. Customers including Deel, Job&Talent, Relay, Wonolo and BGSF have cut the time workers and HR teams spend on each new hire by up to 90 per cent, and at one of its largest customers the platform helped triple the number of qualified applicants who reached their first shift.

Firstwork set the raise against staff shortages in frontline sectors as demand for care, deliveries and energy peaks over winter. The company cited a projected shortfall of 950,000 health workers across the WHO European Region by 2030, and more than 500,000 missing truck drivers in Europe, a figure drawn from the International Road Transport Union’s driver shortage research.

It also pointed to International Energy Agency findings that 60 per cent of energy companies worldwide report labour shortages, and to a projected US shortfall of more than 267,000 registered nurses by 2028 from the Health Resources and Services Administration.

Firstwork said the problem is not only a lack of applicants: many of the workers employers need have already applied but are lost while they wait to be cleared, because each hire can involve documents, background and right-to-work checks, training, payroll setup and other compliance steps spread across systems that do not talk to one another.

“The systems employers rely on were built to record what happened, not to actually do the work,” said Kapoor, Firstwork’s co-founder and chief executive. “That leaves HR and operations teams spending enormous amounts of time chasing documents, coordinating across systems and supporting workers through processes that extend well beyond day one. Applied AI changes what is possible. We can now give every frontline worker the kind of support that used to be reserved for the top of the labor market, from the moment they apply through every stage of their employment.”

Kapoor previously led APAC at Remitly and strategy at Deliveroo Singapore. Choudhary was a director of engineering at Deel after helping build Rippling’s global employment infrastructure.

Research from Beamery found over half of UK job seekers had noticed AI being used during recruitment. Firstwork’s raise follows Intuit’s agreement last week to buy British start-up Sequence, whose AI agents automate billing and revenue tasks for finance teams.

“In under two years, Firstwork has built agents that automate compliance workflows at scale, performing millions of actions every month to reduce the time to clear a worker from days to minutes,” said Tim Rehder, general partner at Earlybird Venture Capital.

Rehder said Firstwork competes for the budget employers spend on the people and outsourced teams who carry out onboarding and compliance by hand, rather than for software budgets, and that it is already winning seven-figure deals.

Prerana Issar, an adviser to Firstwork and former chief people officer at J Sainsbury and NHS England, said: “In frontline businesses, workforce capacity is the strategy. Every candidate lost between offer and first shift means an uncovered shift, a service gap and revenue left on the table. Firstwork turns onboarding from an administrative cost into a competitive advantage, and frees operations teams to focus on the work only people can do.”

Firstwork said it is now extending its agents beyond the period between an accepted offer and a first shift to re-verification, credential renewals, recurring training, compliance management and worker support.

The company will use the funding to grow its applied AI, AI research, engineering and go-to-market teams, expand its presence across the US and Europe, and extend its agents into further parts of frontline workforce operations.

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