Laborup Raises $7.7M to Power America’s Industrial Workforce

We started Laborup with a simple belief: America can’t rebuild its industrial base without rebuilding how we hire the people who power it. 

Today we’re announcing our $5.8 million seed and last year’s $1.935 million pre-seed, bringing total funding to $7.74 million. The seed was led by NVP, with participation from Torch Capital, Threshold, Heartland VC, and angels Jeff Dean, James Slavet, and Evan Moore. Our pre-seed investors include Daybreak, Westbound, Jeff Jordan, Marketplace Capital, Market Square Ventures, and other angels.

Why we’re on this mission

Reshoring is accelerating, factories are humming again, but the talent gap is real. Across the U.S., hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs remain unfilled today, and projections show millions of roles could go unfilled by 2030 if nothing changes. That’s not just an economic drag; it’s a competitiveness and national security risk.

From the plant floor

I started my career on plant floors as a manufacturing engineer in industrial towns across the South. We were constantly shorthanded. One missing machinist could idle a multimillion-dollar line for weeks. Across the Fortune 500, industrial downtime drains roughly $1.4T a year.

Every facility, plant, and yard runs on two things: people and machines. You can have the best equipment in the world, but without the right people to run it, production stalls. Those people are out there—certified and experienced—but they’re invisible on outdated job boards, ghosted by middlemen, and stuck in a process never built for them. That strangles growth and is fast becoming a national security risk.

After hundreds of conversations, from Fortune 100 executives to shop owners, the refrain never changed: “We can’t find talent. Our fallback is staffing firms, job boards, and walk-ins.” When a Fortune 500 with a full HR team hits the same wall as a five-person shop, the failure is upstream. And until now, that’s still how mission-critical roles got filled.

We knew the only way to change it was to build a new system from the ground up.

How we operate:

To build the right system, we became recruiters ourselves. We sat with hiring managers, ran intakes, scheduled weld tests, chased references, and handled no-shows to surface every manual choke point. Out of that work, we’re building agentic, voice-first AI that does the heavy lifting: runs structured interviews, verifies skills and credentials, and routes candidates based on the constraints that decide success, such as shift cadence, commute range, tooling on the line, and supervisor style. It captures plant-floor signal job boards miss, such as CNC programs and changeovers, and weld procedures and tolerances, and it learns from show-up, first-90-day outcomes, and tenure so each match improves the next.

Result: interview-ready workers in days, not weeks.

What’s next:

• Voice-first screening at scale with domain-specific follow-ups and next-step handling
• Skills and credential verification for compliance and fit-for-purpose placements
• AI market-maker that matches on real constraints (tools, shift, commute, team fit)
• Factory models that learn each site’s hiring DNA, plus a performance loop that feeds show-up, first-90-day outcomes, and tenure back into the system

What this funding enables

• Product and data: Build the infrastructure for end-to-end agentic recruiting, including voice-first screening, verification, factory models, constraint-aware matching, and a performance loop tied to outcomes.
• Market build-out: Expand forward-deployed teams across the South and Midwest.
• Workforce network: Screen and verify hundreds of thousands of machinists, welders, and technicians, and deepen pipelines with trade schools and veterans programs to grow a verified talent graph.

The stakes

We are already speeding up hiring timelines and unlocking millions in productivity for teams building fighter-jet components, staffing uranium-enrichment lines, and maintaining critical infrastructure. Delays in staffing push schedules, idle lines, and ripple through programs in shipbuilding and aerospace. Solving this at scale is a strategic imperative.

Thank you

To our partners, customers, and the workers who make America’s industrial engine run, thank you. This round helps us deliver faster and at a greater scale. We’re building for the long haul, one skilled hire at a time.

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