Firstwork raises $15 million Series A for AI onboarding agents
Firstwork, whose AI agents get frontline workers through the paperwork between a job offer and their first shift, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Earlybird Venture Capital.
New investors Legion VC and Deel Ventures joined existing backers Gradient and Y Combinator. SOMA Capital, 468 Capital and Houghton Street Ventures also took part, according to reports.
The round takes the company's total funding to $20 million, after a $5 million seed round in February 2025. It did not disclose a valuation.
CEO Vardhan Kapoor and CTO Shubham Choudhary founded Firstwork in 2024 and went through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch.
About 80% of its roughly 45 employees work from Bengaluru, and it is opening a London office for European customers.
In healthcare, logistics and delivery, many hires drop out while waiting on documents and checks.
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Firstwork's agents contact candidates by text or phone, collect documents, run background and right-to-work checks and arrange training, working inside the employer's existing HR, payroll and screening systems.
The company says more than 1.5 lakh frontline workers now start work through its platform each month. It names Deel, Job&Talent, Relay, Wonolo and BGSF as customers and says they have cut the time spent on each new hire by up to 90%.
Deel, valued at $17.3 billion, is now both a customer and, through Deel Ventures, an investor. Choudhary was previously a Director of Engineering at Deel.
Firstwork will use the money to hire across applied AI, research, engineering and go-to-market, and to grow in the US and Europe.
It also plans to extend its agents to later stages of employment, such as credential renewals, recurring training and compliance.
“The systems employers rely on were built to record what happened, not to actually do the work,”
Kapoor said.
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