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Utmost Raises $21 Million to Become the Vendor Management System for Workday Customers but The Market Needs More Than That

Utmost announced a $21 million Series B round of VC for its vendor management system (VMS). This brings its total raised to $32.2 million.

There’s a renewed focus on the independent (aka contingent) workforce in the work tech market. Like many trends that were chugging along for decades, this one was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The independent workforce represents $1.2 trillion of spend which is about 5.7% of the U.S. GDP. This includes contractors, freelancers, solopreneurs, gig workers, and temp workers and it is also increasingly leveraged by all market segments, from SMB through large enterprise. Innovative models are springing up in this tech category from emerging players that empower new approaches to living in a hybrid workforce world, enabling the enterprise to quickly find and hire these workers like Stoke Talent or providers bringing workforce management and shift scheduling like Sirenum. Of course, incumbents like beeline are leveraging a large enterprise client base while innovating for the future.

We haven’t seen Utmost yet, but its positioning is core to a traditional VMS in a “command and control” sense. Product messaging is focused on driving compliance and cost/spend control. Its integration to Workday creates the potential for a tie to strategic workforce planning. Utmost focused almost exclusively on Workday customers who participated in the recent round via Workday ventures. There’s a great deal of complexity in vendor management at scale. The Workday investment will ensure continued support in that ecosystem while deferring hiring and talent management opportunities to Workday.

In total $2.7 billion was invested globally in work tech during Q1. Get the WorkTech free report and analysis here.

Source: Utmost Raises $21 Million Series B to Accelerate Growth and Expand its Extended Workforce System

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Arc Crowdsourced $1M for Its Job Board Marketplace Focused on Remote Developers

Arc announced a crowdsourcing round of $1 million for its job board marketplace focused on remote developers.

Arc has several of the elements of the emerging modern job board marketplace:

• Specialization: Remote developers
• Value add: Skills certification for developers, which translates to “vetting” for employers.
• Job matching
• Community: A global network of remote developers there to help with the transition to remote.

$582 million was invested globally in recruiting technology during 2021 Q1 alone. In total $2.7 billion was invested globally in work tech during Q1. Get the WorkTech free report and analysis here.

Source: How this Techstars alum used a new crowdfunding law to raise  nearly $1M for remote work platform

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