Firstwork raises $15m Series A for AI agents that onboard frontline staff

Firstwork raises $15m Series A for AI agents that onboard frontline staff

21 October 2026: Firstwork, which uses AI agents to take frontline workers from application to first shift, has raised a $15 million Series A led by Earlybird Venture Capital, with Legion VC and Deel Ventures joining and existing investors Gradient and Y Combinator taking part. The company, founded in 2024, says it has raised $20 million in total.

Not yet independently verified. Customer results and worker numbers are Firstwork's own; it does not state its headquarters, and its announcement carries no date beyond the page metadata of 21 October. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

The paperwork between hire and first shift

For warehouse staff, drivers, care workers and shift workers, the delay between accepting a job and working one is mostly paperwork: identity and right-to-work documents, background checks, training and compliance steps, chased by recruiters across email and phone. Firstwork's agents handle document verification, right-to-work and background checks, training coordination, onboarding and follow-up with the worker, working on top of an employer's existing HR, payroll and screening systems with every action logged. It sells separate document, browser, workflow and compliance agents, and a right-to-work and screening product for the Netherlands.

"The systems employers rely on were built to record what happened, not to actually do the work," said co-founder and chief executive Vardhan Kapoor, who previously led Asia-Pacific at Remitly and worked in strategy at Deliveroo in Singapore. His co-founder and chief technology officer, Shubham Choudhary, was a director of engineering at Deel after helping build Rippling's global employment infrastructure.

The numbers it reports

Firstwork says more than 150,000 frontline workers start work through it each month, and names Deel, Job&Talent, Relay, Wonolo and BGSF as customers. Customers report cutting the time spent per new hire by up to 90%, it says, and at one of its largest customers the number of qualified applicants who reached a first shift tripled. Tim Rehder, general partner at Earlybird, says its agents are "performing millions of actions every month to reduce the time to clear a worker from days to minutes."

Where the money goes

The round pays for applied AI and research, engineering and sales hiring, and expansion across the US and Europe. Firstwork also plans to extend its agents beyond the first shift, into re-verification, credential renewals, recurring training and compliance management, the checks that expire and have to be redone during employment. Employers using it remain responsible for right-to-work decisions, so the audit trail of what each agent checked is the feature compliance teams will look at first. Our onboarding software category lists nine products and our background check software category seven.

Company profile on TrustList: Firstwork

Sources

• Firstwork: Firstwork raises $15M Series A to scale applied AI for frontline workforce operations, 21 October 2026
• TheSaaSNews: Firstwork raises $15M Series A, 21 October 2026