The Mission to Solve the Construction Skilled Labor Challenge Receives New Support: Skillit Raises $8.5M in Additional Funding Adding Bow Capital to Investment Syndicate
In the face of venture capital industry headwinds and while still relatively early in its company journey, Skillit has now raised $13.6M in capital from leading firms Bow Capital, MetaProp, Holt Ventures, and our team at Building Ventures.
The disconnect between supply and demand along with the overall shortage of skilled construction labor required to build our world continues to vex the construction industry, driving very strong interest in Skillit platform. As the Founder and CEO of Skillit, Fraser Patterson says, “As the nation’s leading builders shift to self-perform, the construction industry is in the midst of a transformation that will have a lasting impact on the skilled workforce. This trend will nearly double the number of skilled workers needed over the next five years and there is no robot or AI tool that will ever meet this kind of demand.”
Customers have already seen that Skillit’s data-driven platform is a superior approach to the many previous attempts to solve the skilled labor disconnect/shortage. Skillt taxonomizes and assesses everything from skills and experience to professional goals and preferences in order to generate data-rich worker profiles that make it easy to source, identify, hire and retain the best talent. According to the company this data-driven approach has already resulted in materially more interview requests, offer acceptance rates that are 1.7x the industry average and retention rates that are nearly double.
There is another angle to the Skillit approach that stands out in the market of construction labor solutions: their unique commitment to the skilled workers and the contractors that need them. One thing that became clear to us when first investing time with Fraser even ahead of investing capital was his unique vision to be equally committed to both sides of the success formula. Where others have picked workers or contractors as their primary customer, Skillit has from the beginning and continues steadfastly today remained uniquely committed to both. That is more than just the solution, it is the heart of the company’s culture and sometimes I feel like its soul as well.
It has been exactly one year from our initial investment leading Skillit’s Seed round of funding, and one thing that has been a constant to our eyes is the Skillit team’s endless determination to learn everything they can from their early customer set and apply those learnings by advancing their product offering. While the team and product are growing to meet the market need, it is confidence building for us – and new investors as underlined by this new funding so closely on the heels of the seed round – that an exceptional and experienced team is being built to ensure customer and ultimately market success. Perhaps it is no surprise that a team whose business is talent is also pretty great at winning in its own exceptional talent acquisition efforts!
For all these reasons we are thrilled to have participated with this round’s co-lead investors our friends at MetaProp and new investor Bow Capital. Skillit has all the makings to be a great platform company and this new round of capital will more than adequately fuel the next stage of the journey! #ForABetterBuiltWorld.
