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Venture Capital News: Gigwalk Announces $6M in Series A Funding

2012-10-22
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Gigwalk's mobile work marketplace gives businesses instant access to talented, smartphone-enabled workers across the country.
Gigwalk (http://www.gigwalk.com) today announced $6 Million in Series A venture funding, with the addition of August Capital to existing investors Greylock, Harrison Metal, SoftTech VC, Founder Collective, and AdMob founder Omar Hamoui. Gigwalk's mobile work marketplace gives businesses instant access to talented, smartphone-enabled workers across the country. This round of funding will be used to extend and enhance Gigwalk's marketplace and mobile technology. Additionally, Gigwalk recently launched one of its largest Gigs, expanding a relationship with Microsoft's Bing that will place over 100,000 photo-capture Gigs in 3,500 cities across the country.

With customer adoption of Gigwalk's products accelerating, the company has named former VP of Business Development Bob Bahramipour as CEO to increase its focus on scaling customer acquisition and operations, while CTO and Co-founder Matt Crampton will be expanding his role to CTO and Head of Product. "Watching Gigwalk's growth over the past two years has been awe-inspiring. I couldn't be prouder of where Gigwalk is now. Bob is the perfect person to lead Gigwalk to the next level," said founder Ariel Seidman.

"Mobility is disrupting the way businesses go about finding people to get work done, and the smartphone has become the most important tool in business today. Gigwalk is tapping into this trend to give businesses unprecedented access to a contingent workforce that was once a long and arduous process to hire," said Howard Hartenbaum, general partner at August Capital.

Gigwalk significantly reduces the time and cost for businesses to find, filter, and hire high-quality temporary workers in multiple locations. At the same time, with the unemployment rate remaining stubbornly at around 8% nationally, smartphone owners can use the Gigwalk app to take part in the $70 billion local freelance labor market -- turning their phones into a second paycheck.

The expansion of the Microsoft relationship demonstrates this business need for an instant, easy-to-access workforce. Last year, thousands of Gigwalk workers completed tens of thousands of Gigs for Bing across major metro areas. This year's new crop of Bing Gigs will include cities of all sizes in every state, including Alaska and Hawaii.

"Gigwalk allows us to cost-effectively mobilize thousands of reliable workers to collect rich information and images that would normally be expensive and time consuming to access," said David Gedye, principal program manager at Microsoft. "What really impressed us last year was how quickly we were able to collect Photosynths (rich 3D wraparound immersive panoramas - http://photosynth.net/) of local businesses, and the quality of the work that was delivered. We look forward to seeing the results again this year as we expand the scope of these Gigs.

Businesses post Gigs, such as mystery shopping, store audits, field photography, and much more through Gigwalk.com. These are instantly delivered to user's phones through the Gigwalk app, where users can earn money by completing the Gigs. Individuals have earned up to $14,000 on Gigwalk since 2011.

More information about Gigwalk can be found at http://gigwalk.com/gigwalkworks. The Gigwalk app is available for free in the iTunes store.

About Gigwalk

Gigwalk is a mobile work marketplace connecting businesses with thousands of smartphone enabled field works around the country so they can get work done anywhere. Since its launch in May 2011, members of the Gigwalk network have completed more than 190,000 professional Gigs for businesses. The company is based in San Francisco, Calif., and is backed by Harrison Metal, SoftTech, Greylock Discovery, Accelerator Ventures, August Capital, and Founder Collective.
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