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Q2 2026 Investor Update

Q2 2026 Investor Update

Workstream investors and advisors,

Over the past 2 years we have been investing in building Payroll and AI-first workflows into Workstream’s platform, and I am excited to share that our consistent execution has paid off as we started to reach an inflection point –

We have had our strongest ARR growth in 1H 2026 in the past 2 years, as we reached double digit % growth in 1H 2026! This is also coupled with strong improvements in Net Revenue Retention (brand NRR) and Gross Revenue Retention (brand GRR), as we crossed 103% in NRR and 90% in GRR!

We also crossed 40,000 locations that we serve across more than 1,000 customers from Chick-fil-A ($3M revenue), Culver’s ($1M revenue), ACE Hardware ($500K) and many more!

ARR growth for Workstream


At the same time, I’m excited to share some exciting leadership updates and changes to the company as we enter our next phase of growth.

  • Bastian Purrer - will take on the role of CRO / Head of Revenue. Bastian will lead Sales, Marketing, Partnerships, and GTM Engineering. A serial entrepreneur and former operating leader at YC startups and Groupon, he is also my former classmate at Harvard.
  • Angel Hsia - will take on the role of CFO / Head of Finance. Angel will lead G&A and Operations, consolidating Finance, People, Customer Success, Legal, Revenue Operations, and related business functions. She was previously CFO at multiple startups, led finance and operations teams at Udacity and Kittyhawk (the ed-tech and flying car startups founded by Sebastian Thrun), as well as at Yahoo and Intel.
  • Haiyan Luo - recently joined us as CTO / Head of Engineering, Haiyan recently joined to provide dedicated engineering leadership across our core product and platform teams. He was formerly an AI startup founder, and Head of Engineering at Indeed and ZipRecruiter, where he built and led global engineering organizations of several hundred engineers.

Together, these three will lead day-to-day execution and operations at Workstream, with support from other strong leaders across the team. On a related note, my co-founder Max Wang stepped down from his role in December 2025 due to family and personal circumstances. I will continue to lead the team forward, while my other co-founder, Lei, refocuses on new AI initiatives to help build out our agentic infrastructure.

At the same time, we will be supported by other leaders on the team including

  • Bo Li - Head of Product (former ADP product leader)
  • Jamie Dyra - Head of Customer Success (ex-Stubhub, Utah site lead)
  • Austin Truong - Head of Sales (founding AE turned sales leader)
  • Deckel Israeli - Head of Hiring Product (10 years at Indeed)

In picture (left to right) – Haiyan, Deckel, Austin, Jamie, Desmond, Lei, Angel, Bo, Bastian

Our 2H 2026 OKR / Company Objective

Deliver the agentic Payroll, HR, and Hiring platform powered by AI-native software and services for multi-location businesses.

We continue to invest in building out an agentic platform for our customers and recently launched

  • Mira, our conversational AI agent, launched in beta - bringing us closer to our vision of a headless, agentic platform where customers can simply text to get hiring, onboarding, HR, and payroll done for them, rather than operating software on their own.
  • Alongside Mira, AskAI - our AI-native layer for payroll - rolled out to all payroll customers on the platform, with strong early traction: 150+ accounts have already engaged, with a meaningful share of users returning to use the capability consistently.
  • Our Voice AI technology acts as an extra member of the hiring team and facilitates the hiring process for everyone involved.
    • Voice AI reaching 400+ customers across 2,566 locations and having automated 649k+ minutes of screening for 192k+ candidates cumulatively since launch.(>50% usage)
    • Video AI has 389 customers and over 2,400 candidates have received a video screening. It reduced the interview no-show rate from 10.2% to 1.69%.
    • 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.

In parallel, we are leaning into building AI-native services (article by Sequoia Cap: Services is the New Software). Our plan is to build out agentic payroll and HR powered by managed services, using AI and software to optimize the workflows over time!


As part of this push to build out AI-native services alongside our software platform, we have been actively evaluating acquisition targets and are now narrowing in on one company that we believe strongly complements our roadmap.

  • Potential acquisition: We expect to make an offer in the near term. Given the nature of the deal, we anticipate needing investor approval to issue additional shares to complete the transaction, and we will share more details as the process progresses.
  • Share Issuance Request: Because this acquisition is likely to be partly equity-funded, we anticipate issuing new shares to complete the transaction. We wanted to flag this early so we can align with investors ahead of time, and we will follow up with specific terms (share count, valuation impact, structure) once the deal is further along.

To support this growth, we are bringing on new experienced operators (coupled with up-coming acquisitions). We will also need to expand our equity option pool in the coming weeks enabling us to bring on new executives as well as fund the potential acquisition.

As we continue to scale, we plan to add a preferred investor (and potentially an additional independent member or Workstream executive) to our board of directors in the coming weeks/months. We have held discussions with several preferred investors, and will share updates soon. 

Our team continues to be excited to execute and to build together, and here’s our recent team photos during our offsite in Utah! LinkedIn post about the trip

Investor Support

How you can help (investors & advisors)


We have been getting strategic inbound interest in Workstream for strategic partnerships and beyond, and would appreciate any introductions to
  • POS / Point of Sales companies – NCR, Clover and more
  • Payroll / HCM companies - UKG, ADP, Paylocity and more
  • Global companies looking to enter US - TeamSystem, Access Group, etc

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.

    1. 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!
      1. Here’s the link - https://www.youtube.com/@scaleyourrestaurant
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

 

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

  • Pine Norman - Account Executive
  • Ann Harris - Sales Development Rep
  • Konlin Gappmayer - Sales Development Rep
  • Dan Shay - Sales Development Rep Intern

San Francisco

  • Haiyan Luo - Head of Engineering
  • Aladdin Elston - Cyber Security Engineer
  • Rachel Chen - Strategic Finance Manager

Phillipines

  • Shelley Vidal - Benefits Account Manager
  • Liz Andal - Customer Success Manager
  • Meldee Diaz - Customer Success Manager
  • CJ Salgo - Sr Solutions Engineer
  • Mel Villanueva - Implementation Specialist
  • Maxine Bellosillo - Recruiter

Quarterly Metrics

* Beginning Q2 2026, NRR, GRR, and customer count are calculated on a brand basis—all locations within a franchise brand count as a single enterprise customer, consolidating ~5,000 accounts into ~1,000—to better reflect how we contract and expand within multi-location brands. Prior periods have been restated for comparability.

Q2 2026 continued our trend of positive net ARR growth (+$1M), driven by strong Payroll AIO expansion and improving retention across Mid-Market and SMB segments. Our AI agentic platform and all-in-one payroll strategy continue to deliver results across the board. Customers on the full product suite consistently outperform company-wide averages on NRR, GRR, and GLR, and we're working to replicate that performance across the broader base as we scale Voice AI and On-Demand Interviews, while looking to expand into AI-Native Services.

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

More Investor Update

Q2 2026

Q2 2026 Investor Update

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Q2 2026

Q1 2025 Workstream Investor Update

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Q2 2026

Q2 2025 Workstream Achievements and Next Steps

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Q2 2026

Q3 2025 Operational Highlights & Investor Update

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Personal information is any data that identifies, relates to, or could reasonably be linked to you or your household. A few examples of personal information include:

  • Name or nickname
  • Email address
  • Purchase history
  • Browsing history
  • Location data
  • Employment data
  • IP address
  • Profiles businesses create about you, including pseudonymous profiles (“user1234”)
  • Sensitive personal information

Sensitive personal information or “SPI” is a subset of personal information, defined as:

  • Identifying information (e.g. social security number, driver’s license)
  • Financial data (e.g. debit or credit card numbers)
  • Precise geolocation (within a radius of 1,850 feet)
  • Demographic or protected-class information (e.g. race/ethnicity, religion, union membership)
  • Biometric and genetic data (e.g. fingerprints, palm scans, facial recognition)
  • Communications and content (e.g. mail, email, text messages)
  • Health and sexual orientation (e.g. vaccine records, health history)

Right to Opt-Out

Californians have the right to opt-out of the sale and sharing of their personal information. That means you have the right to opt-out of the sale of your personal information to third parties (e.g. data brokers, advertisers). You also have the right to opt-out of the sharing of your personal information to prevent the targeting of ads across different businesses, websites, apps, or services.

CCPA-covered businesses must provide a link to allow you to exercise this right. It is usually found at the bottom of a webpage and will say “do not sell or share my personal information” or “your privacy choices.” Sometimes businesses offer privacy choices through a pop-up window or form

To opt-out of the sale and sharing of your personal information, click on the link or use the toggle provided by the business and follow the directions. Doing this on every website you visit can feel burdensome, but to ease the burden you can automatically select your privacy preferences for every website by using an opt-out preference signal, or OOPS for short.

An OOPS is a user-friendly and straightforward way for consumers to automatically exercise their right to opt-out of the sale and sharing of their personal information with the businesses they interact with online. An OOPS, such as the Global Privacy Control. It can either be a setting on your internet browser or a browser extension. With an OOPS, consumers do not have to submit individual requests to opt-out of sale or sharing with each business.

Right to Limit

Californians also have the right to direct businesses to limit the use and disclosure of their sensitive personal information.

Businesses covered under the CCPA must provide a link on their website that allows you to request the limiting of your SPI, if they plan on using it in certain ways. That link will also typically be at the bottom of a webpage and will say: “limit the use of my sensitive personal information” or “your privacy choices.” Once you send this request, the business must stop using your SPI for anything other than to:

  • Provide requested goods or services
  • Ensure security and integrity
  • Prevent fraud
  • Maintain system functionality
  • Comply with legal obligations

Bringing it Together

In summary, the CCPA gives you the right to opt-out of the sale and sharing of your personal information and gives you additional rights to further limit the use and disclosure of your sensitive personal information.

When you exercise these rights together, you exert greater control in protecting your personal data which is important for your identity, safety, and financial health.

If you are on a business’s website and you can’t find the links to exercise your rights, remember to check their privacy policy. The privacy policy should tell you how you can exercise your rights under the law.

If you find your rights being violated, you can submit a complaint to CalPrivacy.

Next in the LOCKED series, we will explore the right to correct and right to know. Follow us on social media to get live updates or check back in one week for the next post.

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