French startup iziwork snags $43 million to help temporary workers find jobs and security

French startup iziwork, creators of a platform to improve temporary employment, has secured $43 million in funding from Cathay Innovation and Bpifrance. Founded just two years ago, the platform has raised $68 million to date. The fresh capital will be used to expand in France and abroad, as well as double the R&D team. Why so much funding and why such a large R&D team for a jobs platform? Well, the platform does a lot more than match workers with a gig. Its features and services creep into all kinds of ‘tech’: HRtech, fintech, edtech, even health tech. The Paris-based company says it wanted to reinvent the employment agency, starting from scratch, from onboarding (which takes two minutes on a smartphone app), to personnel management and recruitment. New jobs are filled within four hours (well, 95 percent of them), thanks to an AI-based system that recommends the best profile for each assignment and vice versa. Beyond that, administrative management is fully automated, from timesheets to payroll. Temporary employees have access to benefits they wouldn’t otherwise, including instant deposits, a 10 percent annual paid time savings account, personalised professional training and e-learning and medical teleconsultation. And it’s working. Iziwork saw the number of its users on assignment quadruple between April and December 2020. In total the platform has been used by more than 800,000 candidates and 2,000 client companies in France and Italy. “In a context of economic crisis and worsening unemployment around the world, it is more imperative than ever to reinvent our access to employment, particularly for the least qualified workers,” says co-founder Mehdi Tahri. “Thanks to technological innovation, we have a unique opportunity to offer both more work by making access to employment more fluid, but also better working conditions for temporary workers.”

Photo: Iziwork team