London-based start-up Gameplan has announced today that it has raised £500,000 to continue to develop its Integrated Workforce Management software platform.
The founders – Tom Nimmo (formerly of Hassle.com) and Duncan Mitchell (TempTribe) – raised the round from a combination of Europe’s best venture capital funds (SeedCamp and Swiss Founders Fund) and leading angel investors including Michael Pennington (Gumtree), Will Neale (Fonix) and Tim Ruffner (Talendo).
The raise follows 18 months of software development and market research with the product already being piloted by selected partners from different industries. Gameplan is building a SaaS solution which aims to help businesses reduce cost and increase revenue by streamlining processes in areas such as assigning work to suppliers, communications, access control, real-time job information, time and attendance, forecasting and analytics.
“Tom and I identified an opportunity to create some real value for operators in places like sports stadiums, attractions, conferencing venues, hotels and caterers. We noticed that in many cases outdated and ineffective platforms are being used and onsite teams are currently resorting to things like spreadsheets and text messaging for almost everything,” says Duncan, CEO of Gameplan.
Gameplan estimates that these businesses are losing millions each year from staff churn, time theft, inaccurate billing, poor time and attendance processes and lack of visibility across key analytics.
The founders have considerable sector-specific experience. Tom grew Hassle’s cleaning offering across Europe before the team sold the company to German-based Helpling.com for €32 million. Duncan, on the other hand, developed TempTribe into a market-leader in tech-enabled hospitality staffing.
Kyran Schmidt, investor at Seedcamp, comments: “Managing frontline personnel, especially in the hospitality, facilities and live events industries, is an increasingly complicated task. As the ‘gig economy’ has become mainstream, many of these workforces are now hybridised – a shifting mix of permanent employees, individual contractors and third party suppliers under one umbrella. But from onboarding workers to managing them real-time, the technology serving such workforces is either backward or non-existent, resulting in wasted resources, poor communication and inefficient organisation. That’s why we were so excited to come across Gameplan, whose tools empower both frontline personnel and those responsible for managing such large-scale workforces.
The ‘future of work’ is a category on many people’s lips right now, and Gameplan is certainly one of the most compelling products we’ve seen in the space yet. As founders Duncan and Tom also bring formidable expertise and a deep understanding of the pain points, having both led and scaled separate businesses in the contingent labour space previously. We couldn’t be more delighted to partner with Gameplan on their mission to empower the workforce of tomorrow.”
The company has already attracted interest from major operations in the US, Australia and Qatar and is currently focused on rolling out to local businesses in the UK.
