Utmost, a Workday-native workforce management system, raises $21M

Utmost, a platform that helps companies manage their extended workforce including freelancers, contractors, and other professional services, has raised $21 million in a series B round of funding.

The raise comes amid a flourishing freelance industry. In its recent State of Contingent Workforce Management report, Ardent Partners found that 43% of the U.S. workforce is now built on a non-employee foundation, up from 20% a decade ago.

Workday-native

Founded out of Dublin, Ireland, in 2018, Utmost touts itself as a Workday-native alternative to legacy vendor management systems (VMS), which companies use to serve their non-employee staffing needs. With Utmost, enterprises are promised full visibility into their broader workforce with data-driven insights for procurement, HR, finance, and IT departments.

Utmost gives transparency into extended workforce spend, something that is typically tracked using multiple systems, while companies can also garner data such as what fraction of their workforce are contractors and where they are based.

“Utmost centralizes this data so executive leadership can see how they are spending across the total workforce,” Neha Goel, VP of marketing at Utmost, told VentureBeat.

Above: Utmost dashboard

The main problem that Utmost is looking to solve is that existing VMS’s typically focus on sourcing workers from traditional staffing companies which limits the pool of available talent, plus their systems don’t play nicely with modern human capital management systems such as Workday. So while a company might use Workday for most of their HR needs, hiring personnel have to use another system to book temporary workers. And this is where Utmost comes into play, as it plugs directly into Workday.

According Goel, the platform’s core selling point is that it brings “total workforce visibility” to enterprises, and in its three years in business it has managed to accrue major customers such as Ecolab, NortonLifeLock, and Colonial Life.

Among the benefits are improved compliance. “You can create consistent processes for onboarding and offboarding so that workers gain or lose access to facilities, IT, or systems access,” Goel said, who added that it can also help reduce worker misclassification. “Hiring managers don’t know if they need an employee or a contractor or an agency — they need to get work done. Utmost creates a single place to source workers and recommends the appropriate worker type.”

Ecosystem

Workday, for the uninitiated, is one of the major players in the enterprise SaaS software space, with products spanning finance, HR, business planning, and more. It also represents part of a growing array of companies to adopt a Salesforce-esque ecosystem approach that encourages third-parties to develop integrations and build on top of their platform, while also directly investing in startups via a dedicated venture capital fund.

Indeed, not only does Utmost count Workday as a closely integrated technology partner, but also as a financial backer. Workday Ventures invested in Utmost at its $11.2 million series A round two years ago, and it has now thrown another tranche into the pot for its $21 million series B, which was led by Mosaic Ventures with participation from Greylock Partners, Acadian Ventures, and Alumni Ventures Group.