Student labor marketplace startup Pangea is a Providence, Rhode Island-based startup. It connects youthful talent and businesses in need of freelance labor. The startup announced this morning that it has closed an oversubscribed $2 million seed round.
Pangea CEO and co-founder Adam Alpert said that the company’s goal was to secure $1.5 million, but ended up raising more.
IDEA Fund Partners’ Lister Delgado led the round. Other investors in the transaction included Unpopular Ventures, Brown Angel Group, PJC, and a number of individuals. The startup graduated from Y Combinator earlier in the year, raising a check from the accelerator and another $350,000 since it closed a $400,000 pre-seed round last April. Pangea has raised around $3 million to date.
How does Pangea connect talent with companies?
The startup runs a marketplace that links college-age talent to companies in need of their services. Given the skillset of many college students, social media and web developer work are popular on the Pangea platform.
The model is scaling. Per Alpert and his co-founder John Tambunting, gross merchandise volume (GMV), or the value of sold services on Pangea’s market, rose 400% on a year-over-year basis in Q2 2021. And the CEO disclosed earlier in July that the company’s GMV rose 40% in the preceding four weeks.
Pangea was making $50,000 in transactions between college freelancers and businesses in March 2021. This figure should now be near the $100,000 monthly GMV run-rate threshold.
What will the student labor marketplace startup Pangea use the money for?
Pangea will use the funds to scale its human capital. The company, currently four full-time staff, intends to more than double to nine.
And because it is based in Providence, a cheaper market than New York or San Francisco, its new capital will give it more time to grow. Alpert said that its seed capital will give it “20-25 product cycles”.
The CEO said that building in Providence, a “smaller city,” allows Pangea to better focus. And he said that because investors are now willing to invest remotely, the location is not particularly remote.
The startup is not the only upstart technology company in town. According to Alpert, the Providence startup scene is starting to grow. He said that a year ago, there was very little happening, but now there are now several other venture-backed, seed-stage startups here all working on the same floor as them.
The student labor marketplace startup Pangea now has more capital than it has ever had to keep building out its product lineup, scale GMV, and start extending its runway with revenue growth. Let’s see how far this seed round can take it, and how long it takes the startup to reach the Series A scale.