- Firstwork raised $15 million in its Series A round, led by Earlybird, bringing its total funding to $20 million.
- The company’s AI agents focus on the period between a job offer and an employee’s first shift, since many people hired for frontline positions don’t go through with it at this stage.
- Firstwork has about 45 employees and is setting up a London headquarters to better support its European clients.
As head of strategy and operations at Deliveroo, Vardhan Kapoor recruited and onboarded tens of thousands of riders and even took delivery shifts himself to better understand the role. He told Tech Funding News that the experience showed him there was room for improvement.
Kapoor founded Firstwork in 2024, and the company has since raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Earlybird Venture Capital.
Legion VC, Deel Ventures, and existing investors Gradient and Y Combinator joined the round, bringing Firstwork’s total funding to $20M. SOMA Capital, 468 Capital, and Houghton Street Ventures also participated.
The funds will address the gap between when frontline employees accept a job offer and when they begin their first shift, a phase when many people drop out.
The gap between a job offer and a first shift
The World Health Organization anticipates that Europe will be missing 950,000 health workers by 2030, while the International Road Transport Union states that Europe has approximately 502,000 truck driver positions left unfilled. According to a survey by the International Energy Agency, around 60% of energy companies report labour shortages, and projections by US federal authorities show a shortfall of 267,330 full-time registered nurses by 2028.
When you hire one employee, you generally have to gather documents, carry out background and right-to-work checks, complete the training and arrange payroll in various systems. Firstwork states that with each passing day, the chances rise that the candidate will take a different job or quit.
“There’s a great deal of mess about losing the most suitable candidates, with the candidates themselves getting lost,” Kapoor says, by way of referring to the different requirements of municipal, state, and client organisations.
Firstwork integrates with current HR, payroll, and screening software; its autonomous AI agents help move candidates from application to first shift, manage ongoing compliance, and follow up after shifts to identify problems before employees leave. Every action carried out is recordable. Kapoor states that agents can text or call candidates as they upload documents and progress through the process.
According to Kapoor, clients determine how agents handle compliance. For instance, if an employer hires a new driver, the agents can request any missing documents by text or phone and arrange training, while the employer’s screening vendors carry out the background checks.
Founders who know both sides of the payroll stack
Kapoor was brought up in Dubai and, when he was young, worked with migrant and front-line workers. At Remitly, he was the first person hired outside the US and Europe and later led its Asia-Pacific business, focusing on immigrants and other disadvantaged groups.
Co-founder Shubham Choudhary previously served as director of engineering at Deel and helped Rippling expand globally. Firstwork was in Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch in San Francisco.
Firstwork collaborates with employer-of-record firms which legally employ staff on behalf of their clients. Deel, valued at $17.3 billion in October 2025, is both a customer of Firstwork and, via Deel Ventures, an investor.
Labour budgets over software budgets
Kapoor explains the budget from the customer’s point of view. For many large employers, the usual setup is “an overseas team together with traditional software, the team then altering the software in order to get the worker through the process”.
“Firstwork is addressing one of the largest untouched opportunities for applied AI in enterprise software. 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.
Other investors have also made the same observations. Henry Mason, a partner at Dawn Capital, said customers were permanently altering their labour budgets after the firm led Orbio’s $21 million Series A raise in June 2026.
Meanwhile, Sona, a London-based workforce platform, raised $45 million in its Series B in April 2026, with N47 as the lead investor and Gradient providing support. Job&Talent, which raised €92 million at a €1.3 billion valuation in April 2025, has developed its own recruitment agent, Clara.
The global HR technology market will reach $47.5 billion in 2026 and $77.7 billion by 2031.
Europe is next
“In this round, we are establishing our head office in London. We have received strong interest from the European market in our products. There is room for a new wave of companies which are adopting that practical approach to solving some of the very traditional and unresolved problems in the industry,” says Kapoor.
The company is following examples set by US AI firms such as Runway, which opened its European headquarters in London in June 2026.
A major difficulty will be determining who is responsible for the budget once agents are in use. Employers will demand evidence that the 90% efficiency claim holds up in sectors such as hospitals or logistics companies.
