An app born and raised in Tennessee that says its users get high-paying jobs in manufacturing faster is pushing into the Chattanooga market after opening offices in Knoxville and Nashville.
Laborup screens workers like machinists, technicians and welders to create free profiles that show off their skills. The process is designed to connect recruiters to blue-collar workers, rather than workers having to apply for dozens (or hundreds) of jobs.
Nearly 40,000 users in East Tennessee have been screened on the platform, said Simba Jonga, the app’s founder and CEO and an alumnus of the University of Tennessee. Laborup reports an average 30% pay increase for its users.
While the platform is available to users around the U.S., it launched in 2024 with a focus on East Tennessee. It has since expanded its focus statewide and into Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina and Ohio.
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Tennessee-based app Laborup aims to get Chattanoogans high-paying factory jobs
The company has an office in Knoxville focused on sales and business operations and an office in Nashville focused on software engineering, with around 15 employees between them. Chattanooga makes sense as the next market to attract users and potentially open an office, Jonga said on a visit to the city.
Chattanooga is home to heavy equipment manufacturers like Astec and Miller Industries and a hub for logistics. Manufacturing is the third-largest employment sector in Chattanooga, with 40,500 jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“It’s really at this nexus of the different states we want to expand into,” Jonga said in an interview. “There’s a reason why logistics boomed here … Everything has to go through Chattanooga at some point.”
Users can create a Laborup profile in a web browser like Google Chrome or Safari. The start-up plans to launch a mobile app in December as it attracts more users in urban areas, Jonga said.
Laborup uses artificial intelligence to build detailed profiles faster than individual human recruiters can. Its primary value is for employers who spend lots of money and time hiring workers, only to lose them a shortly thereafter.
Laborup says it speeds hiring processes by five to 10 times, increases retention by over three times and costs companies more than 50% less than traditional hiring processes.
“Usually, the person we’re talking to is a stressed-out operations manager or HR manager,” Jonga said. “They’re in a hiring crunch. There’s a lot of downtime. Machines are not running because they don’t have enough people.”
The app is like a LinkedIn focused on blue-collar workers and employers, and it has attracted major Silicon Valley investors.
MILLIONS RAISED
Laborup raised $7.7 million in two fundraising rounds in 2024 and 2025, it announced in August. Its individual investors include Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind, and Jeff Jordan, a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and a board member at Airbnb.
The app has some of the same early investors as platforms like LinkedIn did. This provides a major advantage for getting connected to clients, Jonga said.
“Most of these investors are usually making 10 to 20 unique investments a year, so it’s largely about the mission,” Jonga said. “It helps a ton to share an early investor with a company, because usually they have the ear of the CEO.”
Jonga, who immigrated to Tennessee with his family from South Africa as a teenager, graduated from UT in 2022. He studied AI as a graduate student at Stanford University before taking leave to create Laborup in 2023.
The app’s clients include East Tennessee manufacturers from Bush’s Beans in Knoxville to HCB Yachts in Vonore. Its broad focus so far is industries that cut or shape metal.
Laborup is designed to attract clients in markets that are growing quickly, like the nuclear industry in Oak Ridge or the distribution industry in Nashville, Jonga said. The startup has met with Siskin Steel in Chattanooga.
Laborup begins the process of working with companies by indexing the physical layout of their plants, including the number of machines and floor plan.
“What you do, and the machines you have and the people you have and those work instructions determine who you’re trying to hire,” Jonga said. “We want to understand the whole operation of the company.”
Jonga said Laborup wants to expand its work with chemical companies like Wacker, which operates a large polysilicon plant in Bradley County north of Chattanooga.
Wacker, Astec and Miller Industries are among Hamilton County employers that laid off workers earlier this year. Some local business leaders pointed to tariffs enacted by President Donald Trump as a cause of uncertainty in their markets.
State and federal data, however, points to growth in manufacturing and a growing need for workers.
THE OPPORTUNITY
Tennessee’s advanced energy sector, which includes nuclear power and electric vehicle manufacturing, generated $56 billion of gross domestic product and supported nearly 421,000 jobs with an average salary of $74,000 in 2024, according to a report from the Tennessee Advanced Energy Business Council.
Manufacturing is projected to be the state’s second-largest sector by employment through 2032, behind health care and social assistance, according to state data. Workers in the sector saw wage growth as the average hourly pay rose from $23.68 to $24.54 in 2024.
But many jobs in the sector go unfilled. There were 409,000 job openings in the U.S. manufacturing industry in August, down from 438,000 in July, according to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (The bureau has not published employment reports for two months during the longest government shutdown in history.)
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The sector could have 3.8 million job openings by 2033, according to a report from the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte.
Recruiting and retaining quality workers was cited by 47% of manufacturers as a top challenge in a quarterly survey published in September by the National Association of Manufacturers.
Laborup hopes to take advantage of a moment when bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. is a bipartisan issue.
“We firmly believe it’s the greatest country in the world, and I think you can’t not have an industrial base,” Jonga said. “The physical world is still the substrate, even for the services of the software world.”
Contact business reporter Daniel Dassow at ddassow@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6318.