Fountain, which provides an applicant tracking system for hourly workers, raises a $85M Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, bringing total funding to $119M
You may have visited some quick-service restaurants or other retailers in the past few months and noticed signs posted … Thanks: @christinemhall
Context & Ripple Effects
Fountain's $85M Series C lands mid-wave: SoftBank Vision Fund 2 had already backed Eightfold AI's $220M Series E for AI-driven recruiting in June and would go on to fund blue-collar HR rival Sense at a reported $500M valuation in December. The through-line is a labor market where quick-service restaurants and retailers are posting 'now hiring' signs and employers are paying for software to fill hourly shifts faster.
The bet aged well by the corpus's own timeline: seven months later Fountain raised a $100M round led by B Capital at a nearly $1B valuation, making this Series C the entry point into what became a decacorn-adjacent trajectory for hourly-hiring software.
First-order effects
- Fountain gets the balance sheet to scale its applicant tracking system for hourly workers, while SoftBank Vision Fund 2 adds a third workforce-software position alongside Eightfold AI and Sense.
Second-order effects
- Rivals serving the same restaurant and retail buyer — Sense in blue-collar recruiting, 7shifts in scheduling — face a newly capitalized competitor and pressure to bundle hiring, screening, and scheduling into one platform rather than sell point tools.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, hourly hiring consolidates from fragmented spreadsheets-and-signage workflows into venture-funded SaaS platforms, with SoftBank's repeated checks effectively underwriting which vendors become the default infrastructure for frontline labor markets.
The trend: SoftBank Vision Fund 2 is concentrating capital in hourly and blue-collar workforce software, turning high-turnover hiring from an operational headache into a funded SaaS category.