Dive Brief:
- BrightGo closed a $3 million funding seed round to expedite development of its janitorial management software, it said in a Nov. 13 release.
- The startup says its platform uses a centralized dashboard integrated with a mobile app to simplify management of large janitorial employee groups across multiple remote locations.
- Janitorial services have been underserved by technology, despite employing millions of workers across the U.S., BrightGo co-founder and CEO Gerald Fong said in the release. Tools currently available for managing janitorial services are “hard to use and often either cumbersome and clunky or don’t talk to each other well,” he said.
Dive Insight:
Janitorial workers constitute the fifth largest job category in the U.S, playing an important role in almost every sector’s operations, according to Indeed. Many companies use outdated technology to manage janitorial services operators, however, resulting in delayed payments and inefficient scheduling, inspection and management processes that put commercial cleaning contracts at risk, BrightGo said.
A lack of transparency, poor communication and barriers associated with manual processes amplify this risk and increase overheads, impeding companies’ efforts to scale business operations, BrightGo said. The company’s janitorial software platform aims to overcome these challenges by leveraging mobile technology, attendance tracking for payroll, inspection systems and an in-app employee communication portal, the release states.
“In the year ahead, we plan to roll out more functionalities to streamline and unify communication between business owners and their employees or contractors through our platform, as well as streamline back-office functions so janitorial companies can better retain customers at a profitable price,” Fong told Facilities Dive in an email.
He noted that the company is currently targeting janitorial businesses in the U.S. and Canada with 50 to 1,000 workers.
BrightGo says it has already signed customers across the U.S. and Canada that provide janitorial services for national supermarket chains, retail stores, malls and other commercial properties. The startup stated plans to expand its team and noted that customer acquisition is “a huge goal” for 2024.
“Our tech has been tested with [a] 95% adoption rate among workers leveraging the platform thus far. However, we have several features on our product roadmap that we want to fast-track in 2024 and increase our team’s size to meet demand,” Fong said.
Costanoa Ventures and Index Ventures led the seed round funding. Fong, a former engineer at Meta, and Saagar Deshpande, a former engineer at data, measurement and analytics software firm EDO and Asana, co-founded the company.
