AI isn't just screening résumés. It's trying to take over everything that happens after someone gets hired.

For frontline employers, making a job offer is often not the hardest part. The real bottleneck comes afterward: collecting documents, completing background and right-to-work checks, scheduling training, setting up payroll and repeatedly following up with candidates before their first shift.

Firstwork has raised $15 million in Series A funding to automate that operational gap with AI agents. The round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital, with participation from Legion VC and Deel Ventures, while existing investors Gradient and Y Combinator also joined. The fundraise takes Firstwork’s total capital raised to $20 million.

Founded in 2024 by Vardhan Kapoor and Shubham Choudhary, Firstwork builds AI agents that sit on top of employers’ existing HR, payroll and screening software. Rather than replacing those systems, the agents coordinate work between them — requesting missing documents, tracking verification, arranging training, handling compliance workflows and following up with workers. Every action is logged and auditable, according to the company.

The scale is already significant. Firstwork says more than 150,000 frontline workers start work through its platform every month, while customers including Deel, Job&Talent, Relay, Wonolo and BGSF have reduced the time workers and HR teams spend on each new hire by as much as 90%. These remain company-reported performance figures.

Firstwork originally focused on the period between an accepted offer and a worker’s first shift. It is now expanding its agents into ongoing workforce operations including re-verification, credential renewals, recurring training, compliance management and worker support.

The fresh capital will support AI research, engineering and go-to-market hiring, while helping Firstwork expand further across the United States and Europe. Its broader bet is simple: frontline hiring does not fail because companies lack another HR dashboard. It fails because too much work still happens between systems — and Firstwork wants AI agents to do that coordination.