Hello Workstream investors and advisors,
We carried our end-of-year momentum into Q1, maintaining a strong focus on execution against our H1 2026 OKR:
Deliver an AI-first Hiring, HR and Payroll platform for multi-location restaurants (200-5,000 employees) with delightful product and customer experience, that is easy and compliant.
We drove continued progress across our highest-impact growth and product priorities while keeping resources tightly aligned to what matters most.
Here are some recent business highlights:
- We have grown from $200K ARR for Payroll AIO in Jan '24 to $3.3M ARR in Mar ‘26, now representing 13% of total company ARR and delivering 127% NRR
- Newest product: On Demand Hiring (ODI) has been released to pilot customers, marking a strategic shift from providing tools to delivering outcomes for our customers
- Our new products continue to gain traction in the market. Voice AI, Talent Network, Ben Admin, and Compliance are generating additional leads and contributing to an increase in closed-won deals, especially those that include the new products.
- Standardized pricing and packaging across Hiring, HR, and Payroll to simplify product offerings, add-ons, quoting, and provisioning — with AI capabilities now included in all base platform tiers, reducing friction in the buying process and strengthening our competitive positioning
We are also leaning into building an agentic platform for hiring and HR, with AI-native services.
We believe that AI + software can get us 80% of the way, but AI-native services will be helpful to get us 100% of the way. We want to build out a “headless” agentic platform where our customers only have to SMS/text with our agent, and our agent will do the actual work of hiring, onboarding, HR and payroll for them.
We will be launching “Mira” our AI agent in the coming weeks in June which will the conversational layer for our customers via SMS / texting and our vision is that they are able to get things done via texting, rather than having to operate the software on their own.
Here are more updates from Q1
- Our Voice AI technology acts as an extra member of the hiring team and facilitates the hiring process for everyone involved.
- Voice AI accelerated to 64% QoQ growth in Q1 2026, now reaching 120+ customers across 2,368 locations and having automated 409k+ minutes of screening for 113k+ candidates cumulatively since launch.
- Our scalable PLG engine continues to drive >75% of new acquisitions, complemented by the successful launch of VideoAI which is officially out of the beta phase
- The technology has consistently reduced interview no-show rates up to 75% while increasing transition rates by ~14%, proving our ability to filter for high-quality talent while consistently maintaining a 30% reduction in time-to-hire.
- On-demand Interview (ODI): The foundational work of the past several quarters has culminated in the pilot of our first Solution-as-a-Service offering. Initial results from our first 5 pilot customers validate increased hiring velocity and positive feedback for this model
- Instant Engagement: Median candidate invite-acceptance in just 19 minutes
- Reduced Friction: Candidates reach an interview stage in ~70 hours, a 22% reduction in time-to-interview compared to traditional job boards.
- Higher Quality of Applicant: Achieved hire rate >4%, performing 2–3x more effectively than Indeed sponsorships
- Ben Admin and Compliance products strengthen our AIO proposition
- Reached $400K in Benefits Admin ARR while continuing to capture market demand and driving higher win rates on deals with the service attached.
- Expanded to 22 active customers, up 57% since last quarter, with a steady implementation pipeline into Q2 2026
- 700+ employees are actively enrolling and managing benefits through our system, up 220% from last quarter
In March, we also had an incredible China offsite in Suzhou, where 75 streamers across engineering, product, and design came together for the first time ever. It was an immersive, high-energy deep dive into what it means to build an AI-first hiring, HR, and payroll platform—unlocking 5–10x development speed with AI agents while shaping a bold, compliant product roadmap.
The discussions spanned everything from product design and QA to GTM, customer success, and DevOps, bringing a true cross-functional lens to our work. The momentum and alignment coming out of this offsite set the stage for us to move faster and build smarter than ever!
Investor Support
How you can help (investors & advisors)
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Content marketing is an important strategy for us as we want to reach out to our restaurant audience and engage them! We started a YouTube channel and are leaning on that as a core content engine for other content channels from IG, email, and more.
- We will appreciate it if you would share the word of our YouTube channel - subscribe, like, and share the channel with other restaurant leaders and operators in your network! Here’s the link - https://www.youtube.com/@scaleyourrestaurant
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We are actively recruiting for many roles across all teams. More specifically, here’s a few top priority roles that we will love to get your help on
- Franchise Sales SDR
- Franchise Sales AE
Workstream Team
We are super excited to welcome an incredible team and new streamers who have years of experience across AI, Payroll, restaurants and more joining us!
New Streamers! (#OneTeamOneStream)
Utah
- Logan Laws - Account Executive
- Ethan Anderson - Sales Development Rep
- Indy Green - Sales Development Rep
- Pablo Riboldi - Sales Development Rep
- Trevor Lonergan - Sales Development Rep
Phillipines
- Ehl Doctor - People Ops Specialist
- Liway Dumas - IT specialist
- Shengfeng Gu - Sr. Product Designer
China
- Ethan Xu - Sr Product Designer
Quarterly Metrics
Our AI agentic platform and all in one payroll strategy is working. Customers on the full product suite consistently outperform company-wide averages across NRR, GRR, and GLR, and we are focused on replicating this performance across the broader customer base as we scale Voice AI, On-Demand Interviews, and Ben Admin adoption. Q1 2026 marked a return to positive net ARR growth (+$1M), driven by strong Payroll AIO expansion and improving retention across Mid-Market and SMB segments.
Thank you all of you for your constant support! We are excited to continue to focus on building the best AI powered HR and Payroll platform for restaurants and look forward to getting your support!
Thank you all!
Cheers,
Desmond
650-804-3747