SkillSoniq, Inc.

SkillSoniq is an online marketplace that uses Artificial Intelligence to connect companies with skilled, local freelancers.

It’s the only company using advanced technology to match employers with suitable “contract to hire” freelancers located in the same city in as little as five business days.

Currently, 1 in 3 U.S. workers are a "freelancer" — i.e., a person who's self-employed and works on a variety of projects for a variety of companies. By 2027, 50% of American workers are projected to be freelancers.

This has created a $25 billion market in the U.S. SkillSoniq is disrupting this market by offering a marketplace that’s unlike any of its competitors. For example:

• Staffing agencies and “job portal” platforms charge commission rates as high as 20% to 25%, and the hiring process can take more than a month.

• Websites like TaskRabbit and Handy focus on household improvement and IT skills, rather than white collar skills like coding, design, and sales/marketing.

• And websites like Upwork and Fiverr feature freelancers located all around the world, as opposed to qualified talent available locally.

It’s this last pain point, specifically, that caused Abby Verma to launch SkillSoniq.

A few years ago, he had a terrible experience working with remote talent. He found it hard to trust the person he’d hired, and had difficulty communicating with them quickly. Working in different time zones caused several headaches.

Verma created SkillSoniq to solve these issues, and make hiring freelancers quick, affordable, and convenient. Here’s how its marketplace works:

Freelancers submit their applications to create a profile, and undergo a background and security check before they can be approved. Once approved, they begin to receive interview and project offers in their area. They’re also classified into one of four categories:

• Professional: Bankers, lawyers, accountants, and financial analysts.

• Creative: Graphic designers, content editors, photographers, and architectural designers.

• Technical: Developers, project managers, data science experts, product managers, and testers.

• Other: Office managers, PowerPoint experts, and operations specialists.

Freelancers can choose to work with clients one of three ways:

• Full-time for a single client at one time.

• Full-time working for multiple clients at a time.

• Or part-time working on the evenings or weekends.

Companies, meanwhile, answer a few basic questions on the type of freelancer they need, and SkillSoniq’s technology automatically connects them to qualified local freelancers.

During a project, freelancers complete timesheets and get paid by the company each week. At the end of the project, SkillSoniq collects anonymous feedback from both parties and uses that data to enhance its matching algorithms for future jobs.

Once a client has begun working with a freelancer, they can choose to extend or terminate the project, replace the freelancer, or hire them full-time.

Behind the scenes, SkillSoniq’s matching abilities are powered by a series of AI-based algorithms. Specifically, this technology includes natural language processing, backward propagation, and deep and machine learning. This enables more precise, effective matching between freelancers and clients.

SkillSoniq makes money in two ways:

• First, it charges freelancers a 10% commission on every dollar paid by the client.

• Second, it charges clients a 10% buyout fee each time they “flip” a freelancer to their payroll.

Under its current model, SkillSoniq spends $375 to acquire each customer, and each customer’s lifetime value is around $1,500. The company targets clients with less than 200 employees, as these companies often can’t afford to waste time on job portals or staffing agencies and want the convenience of working with contractors.

To acquire customers, SkillSoniq uses four different channels:

• Partnerships: The company has partnerships with co-working space companies including WeWork, Serendipity Labs, The Yard, and Bond Collective.

• E-mail Marketing: SkillSoniq has built an in-house tool to gather leads and send targeted emails to clients actively hiring in and around New York, its initial market.

• Channel Partnerships: SkillSoniq is exploring ways to combine its service with other freelance services like payroll companies, insurance providers, and payment providers.

• SEO Campaigns: SkillSoniq has identified a list of 20 keywords that are relevant to its business, and is investing heavily in content to improve its rankings on Google. The company aims to begin receiving inbound leads organically through this channel within the next 12 months.

SkillSoniq was created in 2016, and its team spent the first three years building and scaling its product. The company’s marketplace launched in Q1 2019 and now has more than 6,000 freelancers and 100 clients.

SkillSoniq generated $330,000 in revenue in 2019, and revenue is doubling each quarter. The company has a perfect 5.0 rating on Google from clients, and a 4.6 average rating on TrustPilot. It’s even pulling customers away from entrenched competitors like Upwork due its quality and pricing.

Said Luke Archer, CEO of Insight Health and a SkillSoniq client, “Excellent search functionality, breadth and quality of candidates was highly impressive.”

Moving forward, SkillSoniq aims to collect more data on its freelancers and clients, and use that information to identify strong hiring patterns and improve its prediction power. This will potentially help attract more customers to its platform.

Specifically, SkillSoniq plans to use this data to do the following:

Enhanced Matching: This will enable the company to analyze hiring/declining behaviors and patterns.

Supply-Demand Alignment: SkillSoniq will be able to better predict which freelancers should be approved or declined based on a particular location's supply-and-demand situation.

New Hire Prediction: The company will make recommendations to clients on freelancers who are best suited to become potential full-time hires.

Real-time Feedback: SkillSoniq aims to collect more specific feedback from freelancers, such as their project experience, thoughts working with the client, and their relationship with the manager. This will help SkillSoniq assess each freelancer’s personality and use it to better predict projects for them.

Optimized Utilization: SkillSoniq will receive data on how many hours freelancers work and what they handle on a weekly basis. This will help it suggest additional projects during idle time, enabling freelancers to receive more work.

Team Background

Brian Duggan - Tech Lead

Brian originally joined SkillSoniq as the company’s full stack developer.

After graduating from Boston University, he completed tech-focused “bootcamps” including General Assembly and Flatiron School, becoming an expert coder.

Most recently, he was a senior software developer for PWV Consultants, an IT services company.

He earned his Bachelor’s degree in International Relations.

Abby Verma - Founder

Abby is a serial entrepreneur, who has extensive experience working with Fortune 500 companies.

He started running his own exterior painting business in Detroit, then moved into finance and worked as an investment banking analyst for Merrill Lynch.

Following three years there, he became a credit risk manager with GE Capital, and later became a senior corporate finance manager for Yes Bank.

Prior to starting SkillSoniq, Abby was a finance consultant for EXL (Nasdaq: EXLS), an IT service management company.

He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Finance and Accounting from the University of Michigan, an MBA from the Indian School of Business, and a Master’s degree in Finance Management from the London School of Economics.

Rick Annichiarico - Sales Lead

Rick leads SkillSoniq’s sales efforts and has spent the last nine years helping small businesses grow.

He started his career as a pricing analyst with RBS Greenwich Capital, then spent six years as an investment banker with CitiBank.

From there, he founded Lumarex, a staffing company focused on clients in the e-commerce and finance markets.

Most recently, he was an executive recruiter for PNP Staffing Group, a company providing consulting services to non-profits and social impact organizations.

Rick earned a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Maryland.

Bogdan Zadorozhny - Digital Marketing Lead

Bogdan brings more than eight years of digital marketing experience to SkillSoniq.

He began his career as field marketing specialist for Kognitive Marketing, a Toronto-based advertising company, then moved into a similar position with Match Marketing Group.

He then became a senior marketing manager for EnPowered, a utilities company, and then spent three years as a contract research consultant with Canada’s Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation.

Most recently, Bogdan spent five years as a marketing consultant for Penetrate Business Solutions, a market research company.

He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Wilfrid Laurier University.

Co-Investors