ShareWillow Raises $8.5M Seed for Technician Pay and AI

Before a contractor puts a new incentive plan in front of the crew, ShareWillow can run that plan against the business's existing jobs. The exercise gives the owner a view of who would have earned what, and what the offer would have cost, before employees start organizing their work around it.

The New York company, founded by Ryan Shank, has announced $8.5M in Seed funding to expand performance-pay software and develop AI agents for home service technicians. Its company announcement identifies Circadian Ventures as the lead, alongside participants including Lerer Hippeau, Twelve Below, Notation Capital and Charge Ventures. The investment backs a business moving from explaining earnings after a job toward helping technicians prepare for the work that produces them.

ShareWillow connects the job record to the pay offer

An incentive plan is an operating decision expressed in dollars. Reward completed jobs, larger tickets, memberships or fewer callbacks, and the owner is telling the crew what deserves attention. The choice becomes especially consequential when the person setting the formula also depends on the employee to exercise good judgment in a customer's home.

ShareWillow connects to field-service systems including ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro and Jobber, using job information to support performance-pay calculations. Its current platform lets technicians inspect earnings on their phones and gives owners a process for designing plans, reviewing payouts and exporting figures to payroll. The underlying field-service system remains the operating record; ShareWillow gives those records another job to do.

That position matters commercially. A contractor already using field-service software can consider a compensation product without first replacing the system that organizes the business. ShareWillow still has to earn confidence in the connection between the job, the technician and the applicable rule, because a disputed calculation lands in a relationship that existed long before the software arrived.

The planning tool helps bring that conversation forward. Modeling an offer on actual job history lets the owner examine its consequences while the formula is still changeable. A technician joining the plan should then have a clearer explanation of the behaviors that affect earnings, rather than discovering the rules through a surprising paycheck.

Ryan Shank followed the trades from profit sharing to performance pay

ShareWillow was founded in 2023, according to its official company overview. Ryan Shank previously founded PhoneWagon, which was acquired by CallRail, and describes a career spent building software for service businesses. The path into compensation came from owners looking for a workable way to share business success with the people delivering it.

In his AlleyWatch interview, Ryan Shank describes a product that began with profit sharing for small businesses and became more focused on the trades. That evolution is useful context for the funding. The company found a setting where the employee's actions, the owner's economics and the source data could meet at the level of individual jobs.

The buyer also brings a design problem. An owner needs to decide how the plan treats work quality, sales and efficiency, then communicate those decisions to a team. Software can make the rules more visible and calculations easier to inspect, while responsibility for choosing a sensible offer remains with the business.

ShareWillow's business model follows that relationship. Ryan Shank describes a subscription charged per technician on a plan, with office users free and a design-and-launch service that helps owners establish the arrangement. The implementation work is part of the proposition: the customer is buying help turning an intention about pay into a routine the company can actually administer.

The Seed announcement supports a broader assignment for Willow

The official $8.5M announcement gives ShareWillow resources for a wider product assignment. Ryan Shank's interview names investors including Circadian Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, Twelve Below, Charge Ventures, Notation Capital, Scott Belsky, Austin Rief and Expa. The company plans to grow its team, extend integrations and develop relationships with franchise brands and private-equity platforms in home services.

Lerer Hippeau's investment explanation centers on incentive design and technician retention. That rationale puts the employee's daily experience close to the investment case. The contractor needs enough skilled people to deliver service, and those people need a reason to keep choosing the same employer.

ShareWillow reports 8x revenue growth over 18 months and says technicians earned $2M in performance pay through the platform during September 2026. These are company-reported measures; the payout figure is money earned by technicians, separate from ShareWillow's own revenue. They indicate the workflow is handling consequential compensation, while leaving questions about long-term retention and attribution for a fuller evidence base.

The next product, Willow's planned agent team, reaches into the time before and between jobs. Job Scout is intended to prepare technicians with customer and equipment context, Coach to support progress toward goals, and Plan Architect to model changes. Ryan Shank says the first customers are expected to receive access in early 2027, so the roadmap should be read as planned expansion rather than universal current availability.

More assistance makes the pay conversation more consequential

The move into coaching connects ShareWillow's advice more closely to the outcomes its compensation system measures. A suggestion before a service call can influence the work performed, which may then affect a bonus. For an owner choosing an incentive plan, that connection makes the definition of a good result increasingly important.

An integration is therefore more than a route for moving records into a dashboard. The software needs to assign the right activity to the right technician and apply the intended rule, while preserving a calculation that an owner can review. ShareWillow's planned Payout Agent includes checking records before payroll and bringing missing information to the owner's attention, with approval retained in the workflow.

The operator's opportunity is practical: make an earnings offer easier to understand and administer while getting more use from the job data already collected. That is also where the expansion becomes demanding. A growing set of agents will have to keep its recommendations connected to the compensation arrangement the owner and technician agreed to, across the systems a service business already runs.

ShareWillow is also seeking relationships with franchise brands and private-equity platforms, where an incentive design may need to travel across more than one operating company. That prospect brings the owner back to the rehearsal: running a proposed formula against the jobs already on the books, examining who earns more, and deciding which version is ready to put in front of a wider crew.