We're building the
workforce platform we wished existed
when we ran shifts ourselves.
The work nobody automated.
For two decades, the software industry obsessed over the knowledge worker. Email got smart. Calendars got smart. Sales pipelines got smart. Meanwhile, in the operations corner of every hospital, distribution center, and store, somebody was still rebuilding a roster in Excel at 11 PM on Sunday.
Rostor's two founders met as operators — one ran clinical staffing for a mid-Atlantic health system, the other ran shift planning for a national 3PL during the 2021 peak. They each built homegrown solvers in Python on the side, mostly to keep their sanity. When they compared notes, they realized the problem was the same shape: a constraint satisfaction problem dressed up as a calendar, with humans on the other end of every cell.
We started Rostor in late 2023 to build the platform we wished existed when we were the ones on call. The thesis is simple: scheduling is one of the highest-leverage problems AI can solve right now, because every percentage point of improvement compounds into real human time — sleep, weekends, second jobs, kids picked up on time.
Five principles. Written down. Argued about weekly.
Every product decision is reviewed by someone who has run a real shift. If a manager wouldn't trust the output at 5:42 AM on a Monday, we don't ship it.
If the AI can't tell you why it made a decision, the AI doesn't get to make the decision. No black boxes inside a roster.
Coverage, overtime, fairness, attrition. If a launch doesn't move at least one of those numbers, it doesn't ship. We publish a public benchmark every quarter.
Labor law isn't an afterthought bolted onto a settings page. It's a first-class constraint type, versioned alongside the code.
Full export, no lock-in, deletion inside 30 days on request. We are paid to make your operation work — not to hoard your data.
What 18 months of building looks like.
Operators, ML engineers, and one labor lawyer.
We're a distributed team anchored in Lagos and Dublin. About a third of the team has worked a frontline shift — nursing, warehouse floor lead, restaurant GM, retail district manager. We hire ML researchers who can also read a CBA. We have one full-time labor lawyer on staff. It's the team you'd want building the thing that decides when your people work.
Remote-friendly across NA + EU + EMEA. Visa sponsorship for senior engineering roles.
Backed by people who've built the boring critical stuff.
Series A led by Sequoia Capital ($28M, July 2025). Earlier rounds from Index Ventures, Initialized, and angel checks from operators at Toast, Square, Faire, Cerner, and Workday.
Want to see if we'd be a fit?
We answer every inbound within a day. If we're not the right tool for you, we'll say so and point you at someone who is.
Talk to us