Wilya, formerly known as Gig and Take, an innovative B2B SaaS company transforming traditional HR practices in the manufacturing and supply chain sectors, announced today the successful close of a $4 million seed funding round. The round was led by Ironspring Ventures, with participation from Schematic Ventures, Plug & Play Ventures, Iron Prairie Ventures, Motivate Ventures, and 25Madison. This funding milestone underscores both the growing recognition of Wilya’s cutting-edge approach to flexible work and skills digitization, and the company’s rapid commercial growth.
In addition to the funding news, Wilya is excited to announce its rebranding. “We are taking on the #1 issue for manufacturers through a novel technology solution, informed by our backgrounds in HR and tech,” said Rahil Siddiqui, Founder and CEO of Wilya. “Wilya offers a unique combination of integrated tools to introduce and manage closed pools of skilled, frontline industrial workers, and we are eager to expand on our early successes with this fresh capital and exciting new partners. Our new name also better reflects the increasing capabilities of the SaaS platform as we help our customers be more strategic in scaling up and down their skilled labor in a volatile economy.”
With this new injection of capital, Wilya will accelerate the development and deployment of its software solutions, further expand its market reach, and add product features to address the unique human capital challenges in the supply chain.
“Labor shortages remain a critical issue within US manufacturing, and Wilya’s platform is enabling manufacturers across the US to make great gains in productivity and efficiency by modernizing how factories identify skill sets and deploy their existing workforce,” said Ty Findley, Co-Founder & General Partner at Ironspring Ventures, who will join the Wilya board. “With depth in HR and manufacturing, this could not be a stronger team to understand these challenges. And when paired with impressive 400% commercial growth over the past year, we couldn’t be more excited to partner with Rahil and team.”
Wilya’s intuitive SaaS platform is tailor-made for the needs of frontline supervisors in manufacturing, warehousing and distribution industries. The software provides a ‘skills operating system’ which can be operationalized to facilitate efficient allocation of skills and resources while promoting a more flexible approach to work. With Wilya, companies can better manage and increase productivity of existing full-time labor and introduce flex-worker pools – reducing the cost and complexity of expensive contract workers and forced overtime.
Nearly 50% of manufacturers say they have turned down work due to lack of labor, and experts predict factories will be short more than two million workers by 2030, costing $1 trillion in productivity. With recent US legislation, including the CHIPS Act, IIJA, and IRA, spurring manufacturing activity across the country, it is clear new solutions are needed to address labor challenges in this sector.
“With so many highly-skilled workers retiring and younger employees pursuing roles that provide flexibility of when, how much, and what they work on, the pixelated workforce has officially arrived in the Supply Chain function,” said Andy Biladeau, Chief Transformation Officer, Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM). “Fortunately, Wilya has developed an elegant solution to help manufacturers and distributors easily track and deploy real-time their cross-skilled workers in this dynamic, ever-evolving labor environment.” SHRM Labs is an investor in Wilya.
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