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Overview
America’s industrial future runs on skilled trades. Machinists, welders, CNC programmers, and electricians aren’t being replaced – they’re more essential than ever as manufacturing gets more advanced, automated, and fast-moving. But the systems for hiring them are decades behind.
Laborup is building the hiring infrastructure to enable the next generation of American manufacturing – an AI-powered platform purpose-built to connect manufacturers with the skilled workforce that drives production forward.
The platform automates the most manual parts of hiring (e.g., screening, matching, coordination) while preserving human judgment where it matters. Workers gain access to better jobs, career visibility, and workplace transparency. Employers fill high-stakes roles 4–7x faster, with >90% retention, at a fraction of the cost of legacy staffing firms.
Laborup isn't building a better staffing agency – it's reimagining $40B+ of labor infrastructure that still runs on phone calls and spreadsheets. This is the right product at the right moment: the U.S. is investing trillions into manufacturing, energy, aerospace, and defense. The entire system depends on finding the skilled people who can actually build it.
The Problem
The U.S. is entering a new industrial era. Over $2 trillion in new projects have been announced across clean energy, semiconductors, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing. But progress hinges on a constraint that capital alone can't solve: a deep and growing shortage of skilled labor.
By 2030, more than two million skilled trades jobs are expected to go unfilled. These roles are high-stakes, high-skill positions where quality, reliability, and speed determine whether factories hit production targets or miss market windows. Companies are investing in robotics and automation, but skilled tradespeople with judgment and technical mastery are still the ones keeping those systems running.
The hiring infrastructure for these roles hasn't changed in decades. Most employers rely on legacy staffing firms with manual workflows, slow fill times, and 50%+ turnover. Workers navigate opaque processes, inconsistent communication, and limited visibility into job quality or career growth.
Laborup is changing that. It's moving beyond just accelerating hiring and rebuilding trust, structure, and mobility in a labor market critical to America's competitiveness.
What Got Us Excited
Founder with rare domain fluency: Simba Jonga started his career as a manufacturing engineer, where he saw firsthand how critical roles were filled through outdated, unreliable systems. That exposure gave him clear visibility into the structural failures behind industrial hiring and deep respect for the professionals filling these roles. He later worked in product at Microsoft, then pursued AI research at Stanford as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, co-authoring the 2024 AI Index with teams from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Simba’s unique perspective combines operational depth with AI infrastructure fluency. He’s building a system that reflects both the realities of industrial labor and the technical precision needed to modernize it at scale.
High-friction wedge with clear ROI: Laborup focuses on full-time, skilled trades roles – the hardest placements with the biggest impact. This segment has been avoided by most tech platforms because it's operationally intense and locally fragmented. That's exactly what makes it valuable. Laborup's full-stack approach, from voice-based screening to recruiter workflows, has already achieved >90% placement retention. That outcome wins trust and creates staying power.
Skilled trades need a hiring system built for them: Machinists, welders, electricians, and other tradespeople build their expertise through years of hands-on work, where precision, safety, and reliability define success. The factors that guide their career decisions – jobsite conditions, equipment, safety standards, team culture, pay transparency, and advancement – are often ignored by traditional hiring platforms. Laborup is designed for a workforce that learns by doing, built to understand the skill, context, and nuance behind the work, and to match workers with roles where they can thrive and employers with talent they can trust.
Services-first model with software leverage: This category requires trust and execution before scale. Laborup earns that trust by owning the most complex, time-sensitive workflows upfront, from voice-based screening to end-to-end coordination, and delivering retention rates far above industry norms. Each placement becomes structured data that fuels smarter matching, deeper coordination, and automation. Unlike traditional staffing firms that depend on manual processes and scale only by adding more recruiters (translating into sub-20% gross margins), Laborup’s model gains efficiency and value over time. This foundation turns critical, opex-heavy workflows into a scalable system where every hire makes the platform smarter, redefining the economics and outcomes of best-in-class hiring.
Why it Matters
As manufacturing policy drives increasing capital in domestic investment, our ability to execute depends on motivating, matching, and upleveling skilled talent to where it's needed most.
Every semiconductor fab, battery gigafactory, defense contractor depends on skilled tradespeople who turn engineering drawings into physical reality. The companies that hire smartest will win not just in output, but in the long-term value this industrial cycle creates.
At Torch, we invest in businesses operating at the intersection of consumer behavior, emerging infrastructure, and technology – especially where reimagined experiences can unlock category-defining companies in overlooked markets. We're excited about Laborup because it reflects a broader theme we're spending time on: the most important companies in this next wave won't be the ones that avoid operational complexity. They'll be the ones that take it on directly – structure it, standardize it, and build leverage from the inside out. Laborup is doing that in one of the country's most overlooked and essential labor markets.
We're proud to partner with Simba and the team as they bring structure, speed, and trust to the labor engine behind America's industrial renaissance. And if you're equally as excited about this mission, Laborup is hiring exceptional talent to help build it!
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