Wethos, the leading platform for rapid-response creative and marketing teams, announced today that it has successfully raised an oversubscribed round of $3 million in ninety days, led by NYC-based Laconia Capital and with the participation of Flybridge Capital, Loup Ventures, Higher Ground Labs, and other strategic investors. This latest round follows a year of substantial growth, in which the three-year-old company deployed over one hundred agile, on-demand teams and increased its revenue by five hundred percent.

The company’s tech-enabled “pop-up departments” leverage agile methodology to build brands, websites, digital content, awareness, and growth campaigns in real time based on each client’s unique needs. Recent leadership hires in sales, marketing, and customer experience will enable Wethos to keep up with the demand of its most popular teams, and expand into new verticals.

“As brands struggle to cut through the noise in a rapidly-evolving digital landscape, we need business and creative minds to come together at 100x the speed they do today,” said Wethos co-founder and CEO Rachel Renock. “Legacy operating systems put unnecessary obstacles in the way of brilliant and diverse people who are hungry to help accelerate progress.”

Unlike big agencies with siloed departments, expensive overhead, and opaque pricing, proprietary technology enables Wethos to rapidly scope complex work and curate teams based on each customer’s unique needs. With a growing database of over 4,000 U.S.-based specialists, Wethos pairs together vetted talent from the best brands in technology, politics,
fashion, education, and more.

“The best founders are compelling storytellers, and the most successful companies are the ones who can align a community of customers, partners and advocates around that brand story,” said Jesse Middleton, General Partner at Flybridge Capital and founding team member at WeWork. “The Wethos team has built a platform that offers this “super-power” to companies of all sizes, bringing unlimited, top-tier talent and execution to help solve pressing challenges around customer acquisition and movement building.”

Wethos is also leading the fight for a more ethical gig economy, with standards like guaranteed on-time payments, transparent pricing, and protection from retaliation.

“No matter your location, gender, race, or skill-set, people should be paid fairly for the value they deliver,” said Renock. “With a workforce that’s increasingly remote, flexible, diverse, and craving purpose, we believe treating talent the best will attract the best talent — period. By putting our community of specialists first, and allowing them to connect in real-time, we’re working toward a more distributed and collaborative future.”

Learn more about Wethos here

Founded in May 2015 by IIT Kharagpur graduates Sachin Jaiswal, Keshav Prawasi, Shishir Modi, and Nitin Babel, Niki.ai is a vernacular conversational platform where users can simply talk to ‘Niki’ in order to pay their monthly bills, book bus or movie tickets, browse plans, prepaid recharges, find local deals and much more, while its personalisation helps one choose the option best suited for them.

Backed by Ratan Tata, Unilazer Ventures, and SAP.iO among other investors, with over 4.5 million users (80 percent of whom are living in Tier II, Tier III India), Niki.ai hit a GMV run rate of about $30 million and a revenue run rate of over $1 million in FY18. After adding Hindi language capabilities, it also witnessed 300x growth in Hindi GMV since October 2018, annualised at $40 million.

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