Laborup is making headlines with its AI voice agents, regional expansion plans, and a $7.7 M capital raise
Laborup uses AI to transform how manufacturers hire, connecting companies with vetted, skilled workers faster and more efficiently.
There’s no slowing down the Laborup team.
When the company launched in 2024, it wasn’t just about building a business; it was about changing lives through work. The platform connects corporations with blue-collar workers in manufacturing, energy, aerospace, automotive, and other heavy industries.
For many, it’s meant a life-altering jump in income.
“With an average pay bump of around twenty percent, we are affecting the income for generations of workers,” said Founder and CEO Simba Jonga. “These are people with lives, homes, spouses, and children. And we have helped change some family trees—no doubt.”
That personal impact is the metric the team cares about most.
“At the end of the day, we are working on something meaningful that is worth the pursuit,” Jonga said.
High-profile investors across the country have taken notice.
In 2024, Laborup raised a $1.94 million pre-seed round from Daybreak, Westbound, Jeff Jordan (a16z), Marketplace Capital, Market Square Ventures, and other angels.
By June 2025, the company closed a $5.8 million seed round led by NVP with participation from Torch Capital, Threshold, Heartland VC, and angels including Jeff Dean (Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind), James Slavet (Greylock), and Evan Moore (co-founder of DoorDash).
Total funding now stands at $7.7 million, and Jonga has big plans for how he is going to use the money to scale.
“Thankfully, there are a lot of qualified experts around us to help,” he said.
While notable names like Jeff Dean and Evan Moore bring national expertise around building products for billions of people, Jonga emphasized that some of Laborup’s most trusted mentors are right here in East Tennessee—Brandon Bruce, John Bruck, Marty Brown, and Harry Boston of Market Square Ventures. Jonga said Knoxville-based Market Square Ventures has been a critical early backer, providing not only capital but also a local perspective and relationships that helped Laborup root itself in the region.
With new funding, Laborup is hiring—especially across sales operations and software engineering—to grow its team that is building the platform, driving sales, and onboarding workers.
“With our plans to expand into new markets, we’re going to need more people,” Jonga said.
From Knoxville to the Region
Over the past year, the Laborup team has been hyper-focused on proving the platform’s viability in East Tennessee. The company has built a network of more than 25,000 workers in a region with 48,000 manufacturing workers, according to the BLS. Additionally, they are partnering with manufacturers of every size across aerospace, automotive, energy, nuclear, and advanced manufacturing.
Laborup is working with public industrials and Tier 1 suppliers to staff at scale, improve retention, and unlock millions in production.
Jonga said that Laborup customers are hiring up to 10× faster, at more than 50 percent lower cost, with nearly 3× better retention—driving many of the region’s largest manufacturers to the platform.
Mark Horton, former Head of Talent at SpaceX, shared why: “Laborup is built for manufacturing hiring. It combines expert recruiters with an AI-powered platform to find and screen skilled tradespeople who aren’t on LinkedIn or job boards. That skills-based approach improves retention and reduces time-to-fill.”
Brittany Burton, who has led HR at Mahle and Oshkosh Defense, echoed the impact on the ground: “Laborup is giving industrial recruiting teams a 10× boost. By using AI to source and surface best-fit candidates in record time, recruiters can do more, faster. I’ve sat in the seat of a people leader scrambling to fill critical roles while lines sat quiet—Laborup is the tool I wish I’d had back then
Now, Laborup is ready to scale.
The company opened a Nashville office in Pinnacle at Symphony Place to focus on product engineering, while Knoxville remains the hub for sales operations.
“I have been a road warrior for the past year, driving between all these different markets,” Jonga joked. “But in all seriousness, our goal is to bring what started here in Knoxville to other places. The rest of the state and all across the South and the Midwest. The industrial workforce issues are not unique to here alone. They’re everywhere.”
He plans to first expand across Tennessee and then into Alabama, Ohio, and Georgia, all of which are markets rich in the skilled trades that Laborup serves.
Laborup is already on pace to reach more than 100,000 workers across Tennessee, building the state’s largest dedicated industrial workforce network. And over the next three months, the team will release a suite of new products designed to change the industry—further reducing friction in hiring and reshaping how manufacturers connect with skilled talent.
Tech That Removes Friction
One of Laborup’s biggest breakthroughs of the past year came from asking a simple question: How do we remove friction?
Instead of making workers manually fill out forms with skills, experience, and education, Laborup created an AI voice agent. It asks a series of questions, builds a detailed profile, and automatically matches workers to jobs where they’re a strong fit.
“People don’t like filling out forms and worrying about the best way to phrase things,” Jonga said. “The process is designed to feel like walking into a career advisor’s office—sharing your background while someone else takes notes and lines up opportunities.”
It’s a personalized approach for machinists, welders, and electrical technicians that Jonga says could make the skilled trades job market as accessible as LinkedIn made the professional job market.
Jonga’s vision for Laborup goes beyond matching people with jobs. He sees it as an economic development tool—one that can improve workforce mobility and boost wages at scale.
“LinkedIn did something really special. It made it easier for people to see all the opportunities out there,” he said. “We want to make the market for machinists, welders, and electrical technicians more accessible—so they can find jobs with the best pay, benefits, and retirement plans.”
For Jonga, it all comes back to the individual worker—the person who lands a better-paying job, builds a stronger financial future, and passes that stability down to the next generation.
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