In most businesses, managing freelancers still mostly happens in Excel spreadsheets that are shared across the company. Shortlist wants to make this process more efficient by offering a single platform for managing and paying freelancers and independent contractors. The company, which was founded in 2015 by Martin Konrad (CEO) and Joey Fraiser (COO), today announced that it has raised a $1.5 million seed round from Impulse VC, FundersClub, Alchemist Accelerators and a number of angel investors, including Cisco’s VP on Innovation Maciej Kranz.
At the core of Shortlist is a company’s own curated list of freelancers. Shortlists focus is on very large customers who typically have to manage a large number of freelancers and independent contractors (though it’s obviously happy to work with smaller companies as well).
As Konrad told me, the number of contractors continues to increase (we’ve all heard about the “gig economy,” after all), but few companies have put the tools in place to effectively manage them. Shortlist promises to automate the process from on-boarding new freelancers to performing background checks, approving projects, and routing tasks and assignments…