Alejandro Arrieche
Brigad, a French freelance marketplace that caters to the hospitality and healthcare industry, just raised €33 million in a funding round led by Balderton Capital to keep improving its platform and increase its headcount.
In a blog post shared today, the company emphasized that the money will be used to recruit 350 new employees by 2024 to “continue to improve the experience of businesses and talent on the app”.
Other VC firms including the Wendel Group, Serena Capital, and Square Capital participated in the funding round as well.
More Details About Brigad
The company was founded in 2016 and its services are currently available in France and the United Kingdom. Since its launch, Brigad has managed to match more than 15,000 qualified workers in these countries with over 10,000 organizations.
Brigad describes the jobs it advertises as missions and, thus far, it has been able to provide personnel for over 200,000 of those. The total addressable market for talent for the industries it serves is 100 million in Europe alone according to Brigad’s estimates.
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The firm was founded by Florent Malbranche, its current Chief Executive Officer, and Jean Lebrument, who is currently Brigad’s Chief Product Officer. Initially, they only focused on the hospitality business but they later identified similar needs in the healthcare space.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Malbranche commented that Brigad’s talent receives around a hundred missions per month. The company takes a 20% commission out of their payment in exchange for its services.
In 2021 and 2022, the company grew its revenues from both verticals – healthcare and hospitality – by 2.5x, meaning that the demand for its talent is growing rapidly in the two markets they currently serve.
What Makes Brigad Stand Out from Other Freelance Marketplaces?
According to Brigad, its mission is to provide a better environment and relationship between employers and workers in these industries so they can be better compensated and improve their work-life balance.
“Skilled professionals are now looking for more freedom, flexibility and a good work-life balance. In particular, the hospitality and healthcare industries have experienced a rise of more independent workers recently.”, the company stated.
“This is good news for both large companies and smaller independent businesses, who are always looking for competent and passionate people for sporadic support”, the statement added.
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However, these workers often struggle with feeling “undervalued and under-appreciated” and they have to put up with long hours, highly stressful work environments, meager benefits, and low salaries.
Brigad’s value proposition helps organizations to have more flexible organizational structures that can be adapted based on how the economic environment is shaping up. At a point when the world is entering a period of economic slowdown, employers greatly appreciate the fact that they can quickly reduce their overhead or ramp up their headcount as needed.
In addition, its competitive advantage for talent is that Brigad removes the barriers that workers typically face when they are trying to negotiate this kind of arrangement such as getting paid on time and defining the scope and reach of the job.
Most Workers in Europe are Attracted to Freelancing
According to a study from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), workers in Europe have been turning to freelancing to have more flexibility, independence, and an ampler scope of choices so they can ultimately decide who they work with.
Even though becoming self-employed is a goal for millions of workers in the region, the typical marketplaces out there are mostly focused on digital marketing, IT, design, and customer support jobs.
The healthcare and hospitality industries’ needs are highly complex to be catered by these generalist platforms and that is where Brigad has a competitive advantage as they know how the market works, what organizations are looking for, and how they can offer an attractive value proposition to prospective talent.
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Alejandro Arrieche.
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