Chicago tech startup Yourco received a $6 million investment in its platform that lets organizations use text messages to communicate with deskless employees in industries such as construction, manufacturing, hospitality and transportation.
Yourco, based in the Loop, announced the investment from Indianapolis-based venture capital firm High Alpha last week. The funding also helps expand the startup’s new AI-powered system that analyzes communications between workers and employers using Yourco.
Brothers Brodie and Benjamin Meyer, Yourco’s chief technology officer, started the company in 2021 after noticing most internal business communication tools are designed to reach office workers. It has grown to 14 employees and expects to reach 30 this year, with plans to fill roles in engineering, sales and marketing.
The brothers initially built Yourco for their grandparents’ print shop, M&G, near Brighton Park. Their aunt runs M&G’s human resources department and asked the brothers to create software for communicating with plant floor employees, Yourco CEO Brodie Meyer said. They initially declined because messaging tools such as Slack exist.
But M&G’s plant floor employees didn’t want to download mobile apps and some don’t have unlimited data plans. When the brothers saw workers texting on their phones, “a lightbulb went off,” Brodie Meyer said.
They did market research and found that other companies have similar challenges with workforce communication.
Many blue-collar workers don’t have company email addresses because employers don’t want to pay the cost and there is high turnover. Instead, employers often use posters, handouts and bulletin boards to communicate with workers.
“You’d be surprised,” Meyer said of how many organizations use analog methods. Some workers also own flip phones, not smartphones, he added.
Yourco doesn’t require users to download a mobile app, unlike Slack, Microsoft Teams or other software. Nor does it require a mobile data plan or company email address.
For example, construction firms can send toll-free text alerts about safety updates; hotels can relay policies to new staff members; and factories can coordinate shift changes.
Yourco can translate messages into 135 languages. Spanish, French and Creole are some of the most commonly-used, Meyer said.
Messages are automatically translated into the employee’s preferred language and workers can reply or start conversations directly by text message. Communications are automatically documented and time-stamped for future reference.
Yourco makes communicating with workers “more inclusive,” Meyer said. Frontline workers are often overlooked, but growing up in a blue-collar family made him more attuned to them. Yourco aims to “make it extremely easy” to communicate “and include every part of the workforce,” he said.
The potential market is large and many hands-on jobs can’t be automated. About 80% of the global workforce is deskless, Meyer said citing data from venture capital firm Emergence.
Yourco has nearly 1,000 clients, including small businesses and large organizations in 50 states and Canada, such as Indianapolis Airport Authority, Clyde’s Donuts and adhesive maker ThreeBond.
Yourco’s new AI feature, called Frontline Intelligence, analyzes employer-worker communications to spot safety issues, understand employee sentiment and compile reports.
Ohio-based Great Day Improvements, the second-largest U.S. home remodeling company, uses Yourco’s platform.
“We use it daily for HR and operational communications at the local level and for organization-wide communications and frontline employee data analysis at the corporate level,” Madison Farrell, Great Day’s director of culture and internal communications, said in a news release. “The ease of use and implementation has driven full adoption across our workforce.”
