Veryable, a Dallas tech company that connects businesses to independent workers for manufacturing and distribution, has raised a $31.9 million Series A round to continue working toward its goal to “variablize” labor.
The funding was led by Gigafund, a VC firm with more than $1.6 billion in assets under management from former Founders Fund partners Luke Nosek and Stephen Oskoui. Gigafund aims to back “the world’s most ambitious and transformative entrepreneurs.” Its largest investments include SpaceX, Lambda School, Luminous Computing, and the Boring Company. And now, Veryable.
Additional participation came from Trust Ventures. The capital will be used to grow Veryable’s U.S. footprint and enhance its product.
“Veryable is helping the U.S. regain its position as a manufacturing powerhouse,” Stephen Oskoui, managing partner of Gigafund, said in a statement. “[CEO and Co-Founder Mike Kinder] and his team are thinking big, and they have the knowledge and the drive to back up their ambition.”
Transforming the manufacturing industry
Veryable is looking to transform the more than $2 trillion U.S. manufacturing industry. Its core industrial technology serves as a marketplace for on-demand labor, empowering manufacturing, distribution, and logistics companies to quickly hire gig workers as needed. These businesses can flex their capacity up and down according to demand.
Veryable CEO and Co-Founder Mike Kinder
On the other end, workers are given more options for when and how they work. The operations-driven approach to labor allows tens of thousands of independent workers to use their skills flexibly and with upward mobility.
Veryable says this is a crucial step into next-generation manufacturing—and digitally transforming the industry.
“We believe in people and the dignity of work,” Veryable CEO and Co-Founder Mike Kinder said in the statement. “The Veryable platform allows people to construct work schedules where they can optimize their economic needs against other big priorities such as family, school, community, freedom, and independence.”
Striving for agility, flexibility, and speed
Fundamental problems in manufacturing—the need for agility, flexibility, and speed—motivated Kinder and his partner, Noah Labhart, to launch Veryable in 2016.
Their term “variablize” comes from allowing manufacturing businesses to structure labor costs into small increments. That way businesses can increase spending only as their output increases, allowing for scaling with a lower fixed labor cost.
The co-founders’ vision is paying off for clients, yielding higher productivity, flexible work arrangements, and fewer administrative burdens. With their technology, the end goal is to transform the antiquated labor market into a real-time marketplace.
The benefits to this approach are two-fold, they say: More people are put to work, while manufacturers and suppliers can improve overall productivity and achieve organic growth.
A catalytic effect
Veryable hopes its approach to labor will become “a catalyst for other forms of industrial technology.” That could include the connected factory, augmented reality, or additive manufacturing.
In solving first-order labor constraints, Kinder and Labhart believe production and distribution environments can improve. That’s despite the ongoing disruption with supply chains amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re providing a technology that allows companies to capitalize on the main way to win. At the same time, we’re giving a lot of people the ability to rise up, build skills, demonstrate progression, and make good money,” Kinder previously told Dallas Innovates. “Manufacturing is still very much about people at its core.”
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