Instant Teams, a member of the latest Blue Startups cohort, announced a $1.5M round of financing led by Baltimore-based Squadra Ventures. The investment will be used to fund the continued expansion of the remote workforce supplier and management platform.
The funding will go toward marketing, technology, and administrative functions and for further development of its proprietary remote workforce management platform.
CEO, Liza Rodewald, and COO, Erica McMannes, met in 2014 while stationed in Virginia. Rodewald is now in Hawaii where her husband is stationed, while McMannes is in California.
As military spouses and entrepreneurs they saw the potential value of the under-utilized and underemployed community around them. They knew spouses were waiting to be activated. With over 125 percent year over year growth since 2017, Instant Teams is set to transform how business leaders find and manage remote talent.
“Last year our remote team members contributed 40,000 hours of work to over 40 customers. We worked with massive corporations needing heightened support on two week timelines to medium-sized businesses needing ongoing customer success resources,” said Rodewald. “Today we have 8.000 Instant Teams certified remote team members ready for roles. For us, that’s what’s driving the future of work.”
“With the ability to rapidly spin up teams of pre-vetted, skilled professionals on-demand and integrate them into a customer team, Instant Teams has raised the bar for what executives should expect from their outsourced solutions,” said Guy Filippelli, Squadra Ventures’ Managing Partner. “What Liza and Erica have accomplished over the last three years has radically changed the access to and availability of professional opportunities for the 24 percent of active-duty military spouses who are unemployed. This is the kind of impact that changes lives, and we are all in.”
Instant Teams’ remote workforce management platform, Arti, enables hiring managers and executives to define required talent needs and timelines and matches pre-qualified, native english speaking team members to the project. With Arti, Instant Teams works with companies to efficiently define their hiring requirements, instantly source top candidates from a unique military-connected workforce, quickly and easily onboard, manage, and retain flexible teams.
Along with market expansion and product development, Instant Teams will use the investment to bring their technology team in-house, add new executive leadership, and scale their sales outreach process. Squadra Ventures’ Filippelli will join the Instant Teams board.
About Instant Teams
Instant Teams utilizes Arti, a proprietary remote team software, to build and manage teams of highly-skilled military spouses, a previously untapped resource. Instant Teams works with companies in diverse sectors such as cybersecurity, healthcare, and travel to efficiently source, hire, onboard, manage, and retain a strong workforce, providing flexibility and opportunity for both customers and team members.
About Squadra Ventures
Squadra Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm led by founder-operators that invests in industry-agnostic enterprise software companies located in the Mid-Atlantic and emerging technology hubs. By applying significant resources beyond the check, we are building a growth engine for early stage startups, working hand-in-hand with our entrepreneurs to help our portfolio companies win and leave a lasting positive impact on the world.