The Story of Movo: Building the Future of Workforce Management
Sometimes the biggest opportunities emerge from the most fundamental challenges. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jason Radisson shared how Movo is reshaping workforce management by bringing marketplace dynamics to enterprise labor deployment.
From Marketplace Origins to Workforce Innovation
After leading 99 Taxis to Latin America’s first unicorn exit, Jason recognized an opportunity to apply marketplace technology to a broader challenge: “We started Movo, essentially, to take that technology, to take the gig economy platform per se, and to refine it and to use it as a vessel for change for a lot of industries that employ millions and millions of frontline workers.”
The timing proved critical. Movo launched just before the pandemic, immediately finding itself at the center of an unprecedented labor crisis. “Throughout the pandemic, really our main value out there and the impact were able to have was in providing access to jobs and making sure that food manufacturing, a number of logistics, and last mile logistics companies and companies like that, some medical device manufacturing and others, were all able to kind of keep the trains on time.”
Evolution to Real-Time Workforce Platform
What started as a solution for labor gaps evolved into something more fundamental: a complete transformation of how companies manage their workforce. “Mobile is a workforce platform that’s on your device, it’s on your supervisor’s device, it’s in head office, and the whole company is using it to make sure that everybody’s deployed in the right way, in the right role at the right time, managing tasks, managing schedules, doing all of these things automatically.”
This real-time approach to workforce management represents a dramatic shift from traditional systems. Rather than relying on static schedules and manual processes, Movo brings the dynamism of marketplace platforms to enterprise workforce deployment.
Early Market Validation
The impact has been significant. Just six months into commercial rollout, Jason notes their “paid user counts on the software deployment. Our software rollout are increasing about 100% a month at the moment.” This growth comes from solving fundamental productivity challenges in an era of workforce decline.
“If you look at the US, we’re in a situation of a declining workforce. We’ve got more people retiring than ever before. We’ve got fewer people entering the workforce. We’ve got a lot of people checking out,” Jason explains. This demographic reality makes productivity improvements essential.
Building for Enterprise Scale
Rather than pursuing broad market penetration, Movo focuses on strategic enterprise deployments. “It isn’t the kind of thing that you can kind of do from. It’s got to be somewhere very high in the organization and a strategic priority for the company. And those are the only clients that we’re looking to work with.”
This focus on enterprise-ready solutions has shaped their entire approach. Their international expansion strategy, for instance, accelerated product development: “having gone abroad as early as we did, that allowed us to get hundreds of thousands of additional workers on our platform, which was just so helpful in terms of rounding out the tech, training our models, getting a very robust system.”
The Future Vision
Looking ahead, Jason sees Movo playing a transformative role in solving workforce productivity challenges: “I want the company first and by extension, of world. But our goal is to make a win and an improvement in, like I said, the productivity for companies, but also the standard of living for tens of millions of frontline workers.”
This vision goes beyond simple efficiency gains. “There aren’t a lot of silver bullets when you talk about the frontline worker problem… I think our platform is at least, it’s one of the few answers that technology in a really scalable way has come up with for that problem.”
For companies willing to embrace change, the impact could be dramatic: “That means higher wages. That means you’re able to be out there as a high road employer, having a big impact on the communities that you’re operating in.” It’s a vision of workforce management that aligns corporate efficiency with worker wellbeing, powered by real-time technology and marketplace dynamics.