Homebase: Hourly-Work Software and Labor Data

Category: PPP and small-business finance
Pandemic-layoff role: Non-ranked PPP comparison company / real-time small-business labor data source
Last updated: 2026-06-25
Related executive profiles: John Waldmann, Rushi Patel

Role in pandemic relief

Reader shorthand: real-time small-business labor-data source and coalition signatory, not a PPP processor.
What Homebase did for customers: continued selling scheduling, time-clock, payroll, and hourly-team management software to local businesses hurt by shutdowns.
What Homebase gave the pandemic-relief debate: supplied high-frequency timecard and hours-worked data showing the small-business labor collapse before official statistics could.
Where responsibility sat: Homebase did not originate, refer, fund, or service PPP loans in the documented record; its role was evidentiary and analytical.

Snapshot

Field	Profile
Company	Homebase
Legal / operating status	Privately held software company
Founded	2014
Founders	John Waldmann and Rushi Patel
Headquarters / offices	San Francisco; company materials also list Houston, Denver, and Toronto
Core business	Scheduling, time clocks, timesheets, payroll, hiring, team communication, HR and compliance tools for small businesses with hourly workers
Current scale	Homebase says more than 150,000 small businesses use the platform; its homepage says 3.5 million workers used Homebase in 2025
Pandemic relevance	Public real-time timeclock data for small businesses and hourly workers; signatory to the March 24, 2020 fintech relief letter
PPP role	We found no evidence that Homebase originated PPP loans or processed PPP applications
Enforcement and litigation	We found no PPP-related enforcement action or court case

Founders, Executives, and Investors

Homebase was founded in 2014 by John Waldmann and Rushi Patel. Waldmann is the co-founder and CEO. Patel is a co-founder; Homebase announced in January 2024 that he had added the chief revenue officer title while remaining chief operating officer.

The company is venture-backed. Its disclosed investor base includes Khosla Ventures, Baseline Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Bedrock Capital, GGV / Notable Capital, PLUS Capital, Emerson Collective, and L Catterton Growth. Homebase also brought in a set of individual investors around the 2021 Series C, including Kat Cole, Jocelyn Mangan, Mike Dinsdale, Rachel Carlson, Matthew McConaughey, Jrue Holiday, and Lauren Holiday.

Homebase announced Philip Moon as chief financial officer in January 2024, shortly before the Series D. The same announcement said Homebase had hired Oliver Fisher as chief technology officer and Candy Lee as chief marketing officer during the prior leadership expansion.

Business Before the Pandemic

Homebase entered 2020 as a freemium workforce-management platform for local businesses with hourly employees. Its early product was the software layer for schedules, time clocks, timesheets, shift communication, hiring, onboarding, payroll-adjacent workflows.

Its early financing:

Date	Round / financing event	Amount	Lead / participants	What it funded
August 2016	Series A	$6 million	Led by Khosla Ventures; Baseline Ventures and Cowboy Ventures participated	Team growth and product development for a freemium scheduling and time-management app
June 2018	Series B	$20 million	Led by Bain Capital Ventures; Baseline Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and others participated	Homebase Hiring, more customer adoption, partnerships, and product expansion

By the time of the 2018 Series B, Homebase was already describing more than 100,000 local businesses as having relied on its free and paid products. That is a company adoption claim, separate from the active data panel later used by economists. The St. Louis Fed described the January 2020 Homebase dataset as covering about 60,000 U.S. businesses and roughly 1 million hourly employees.

During the Pandemic

Homebase's pandemic role began with the data exhaust from its core product. When hourly workers clocked in and out, Homebase could see hours worked, employees active, and businesses open. In March 2020, official labor statistics still lagged the shutdown.

Homebase made a public COVID data page and described its purpose: governments and communities needed to understand the damage to small businesses and hourly workers in real time. Its own October 2020 write-up said forced closures began showing up in the data before many orders formally took effect, with hours already down 21 percent nationally on March 16, then falling further as closures spread.

The March 24, 2020 OnDeck-led letter to congressional leadership used the Homebase statistic in the case for emergency financing. The letter asked for upward of $500 billion in discretionary small-business funding and said private companies stood ready to help with "data, expertise, and engineering resources." Homebase supplied the first of those three.

Economists used the same kind of data almost immediately. The St. Louis Fed used daily Homebase employment readings to build a real-time labor-market index, noting that the dataset covered 60,000 businesses and around 1 million hourly workers as of January 2020. The Fed found a strong correlation between Homebase and official Current Population Survey employment changes, while also noting that Homebase's change was larger on average because its customer base leaned toward food and beverage, retail, and service firms.

Bartik, Bertrand, Lin, Rothstein, and Unrath used Homebase data in the NBER paper "Measuring the Labor Market at the Onset of the COVID-19 Crisis." Yale's Tobin Center work reported that average hours worked at small businesses fell 60 percent in March, using data from Homebase firms, and that as of June 6 hours remained 35.9 percent below pre-pandemic levels.

After the First Shock

Homebase raised a Series C in July 2021:

Date	Round / financing event	Amount	Lead / participants	Company-reported scale
July 2021	Series C	$71 million	Led by GGV Capital; Bain Capital Ventures, Baseline Ventures, Bedrock Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Khosla Ventures, PLUS Capital, and individual investors participated	More than 100,000 small businesses; $109 million total funding to date
April 2024	Series D	$60 million	Led by L Catterton Growth, with Emerson Collective and returning investors including Notable Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, and PLUS Capital	More than 100,000 small businesses; more than 2 million employees in related coverage

The Series C announced the next phase: expand from scheduling and time tracking into a broader small-business HR and payroll platform. The Series D continued the same logic. By then Homebase described itself as an all-in-one HR and team-management app with scheduling, time tracking, payroll, earned-wage access, messaging, and HR tools.

The disclosed financing record supports a total funding estimate of about $169 million after the Series D. Homebase's July 2021 announcement put total funding at $109 million after the Series C; adding the $60 million Series D gets to $169 million. The four large announced rounds listed above total $157 million, which means earlier seed or other financing fills the gap.

Product scope also moved toward fintech-adjacent payroll features. Homebase currently sells paid software plans by location, with a free basic tier for one location and up to 10 employees. Its public pricing page lists monthly paid plans for Essentials, Plus, and All-in-One, and a payroll add-on priced at a base monthly fee plus a per-employee charge. Homebase's payroll pages describe automated payroll tax payments and filings, direct deposit, W-2s and 1099s, employee self-service, and early access to earned wages.

Plaid's Homebase customer story says Homebase has processed more than $5 billion in payroll and that 3.5 million employees logged a shift on Homebase in the prior year. That figure comes from partner marketing and is not audited. Homebase is private and does not publish GAAP revenue, margin, cash burn, or valuation figures in the manner a public company would.

Where the Company Is Now

Homebase remains independent and active. Its current public positioning is "the everything app for hourly teams," with scheduling, time clocks, payroll, hiring, communication, HR, and AI assistants in one product family.

The company's current public materials say more than 150,000 businesses use Homebase. Its homepage says more than 3.5 million small-business employees used Homebase in 2025, logging more than 1.2 billion hours. A December 2025 Business Wire release said Homebase's AI assistants had handled nearly 2 million administrative tasks in a matter of months, with more than 20,000 small businesses using the new assistants and more than 150,000 benefiting from AI and automation across the product.

Homebase also continues to publish Main Street labor-market data through its Main Street Health Report.

Free tier, paid plans and add-ons

Homebase's business model is a freemium-to-paid software platform with add-on monetization:

Free entry tier for very small single-location teams.
Paid per-location subscriptions for more scheduling, time tracking, communication, onboarding, labor-cost, HR, and compliance features.
Payroll sold as an add-on or bundled in newer payroll-oriented pricing flows.
Additional add-ons for tip management, background checks, task management, job-post boosts, and hiring assistance.
Earned-wage access / cash-out features tied to payroll and wage data.

The model: acquire small businesses through free scheduling and time-clock software, then attach higher-value workflow and financial products once Homebase becomes the system of record for shifts, hours, workers, and pay.

Homebase Profile: Hourly-Work Software, Pandemic Data, and Current Status