Dumpling was founded to give as many people as possible the opportunity to launch and grow their own business. Today, there are thousands of Business Owners, including numerous gig workers, running personal shopping businesses on the platform. We make updates regularly to improve the Business Owner and client experience, and we understand that no change will be met with unanimous approval from the growing community of Business Owners. Our fall 2020 update stirred up strong sentiments. In doing so, assertions were made that run counter to our founding mission and to the work our team does each and every day…
Today, we’re thrilled to announce that dumpling has raised a $6.5 million Series A funding round, led by Forerunner Ventures.
With this funding, we’re improving the tools, technology, and business support we provide to thousands of local shopping and delivery businesses. We’re expanding our reach to help even more individuals transition to self-employment by removing the complexity, overhead, and friction from starting a business. We’re investing in features that enable business owners to provide more personal, meaningful, and ongoing relationships with their clients. …
In the midst of this historic movement to end systemic racism, hate, and police brutality against Black people in our country — we are all asking ourselves what we can do to join and support this important fight.
Speaking up and making our individual and collective voices heard is something we all must do.
We can also put our dollars to work by supporting Black-owned businesses, here and now. We’ve received numerous requests for a list of these businesses, which has also been echoed with a growing trend of web searches looking for the same in cities nationwide.
To this…
At dumpling, everything is personal. We are committed to empowering people in an industry where humans — not machines or algorithms — are best equipped to do the job. We believe that when empowered people have the right tools, the customer wins. We built a platform for individuals to run their own personal grocery delivery businesses, enabling them to deliver the most customized and personalized service for their customers.
Why make it personal? Over the years, it’s become clear to us that the gig economy has been built at the expense of — not for — millions of independent contractors…
The beginnings of dumpling started with our original focus on building a community for workers to share their voice and promote positive change at their workplace. The voices of thousands of independent contractors in the Gig Economy quickly jumped out and grabbed our attention.
While on-demand apps like Instacart and Uber have quickly grown in popularity and success, the experience and day to day realities of the workers that make these apps and services so successful is quite the opposite.
Many of the independent contractors that we talked to loved their jobs but absolutely hated the way they were being…
