French startup Side raised another $5.7 million with Xavier Niel leading the round. As the name suggests, Side lets students make some money on the side by working for companies for a few days or weeks. It’s a marketplace that helps you scale your workforce for a product launch, peak season and more.
Aglaé Ventures, Jacques-Antoine Granjon and others are also participating in today’s funding round, as well as existing investors Connect Ventures, Fly Ventures and TheFamily.
Think about Side as a sort of “staffing-as-a-service” startup. It isn’t a typical job board or temp agency. It’s a marketplace of freelancers that you can hire for a specific task. It’s like being a Deliveroo driver, but for all sorts of jobs.
Side handles all the administrative tasks — billing clients, collecting payments and paying you. It then takes a 20 percent cut.
Companies start by posting a job on Side’s website. As many companies rely on Side for the same kind of tasks, the startup now has templates to help you post an offer.
Students get notified on their phone that there’s a new task. They can then apply, chat with companies and manage their information from the app.
So far, 600 companies rely on Side in London, Paris and Lyon. Fifteen thousand people have accepted a task on Side overall. The marketplace is growing by 19 percent month over month, and 90 percent of jobs are filled in less than 24 hours.
Typical jobs range from customer support to sales assistant, events or packing products so that they can be shipped. Side plans to open new cities in France and the U.K. and improve the structure of the marketplace over time.