Layoffs hit San Francisco care supplier Honor

Honor, a home care and related technology company, has laid off 35 employees at its San Francisco headquarters, The Chronicle has learned.

Jessica Gilmartin, Honor’s chief marketing officer, said the layoffs were cross-departmental, including general administrative and personnel roles. Honor plans to continue expanding the nursing workforce, she added.

“We have recently shed a small number of jobs – less than 10% of our total workforce excluding nurses,” Gilmartin wrote in an email. “These targeted reductions were made in the normal course of business and we have no further comment on why we made these small adjustments to our workforce.”

Honor was founded in 2014 and has been providing services in Contra Costa County since 2015. Today the company provides non-medical carers in the Bay Area and in more than 800 cities in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Ohio, and Michigan. The company initially hired its own home care workers and in 2016 moved them from independent contractors to regular employees with benefits and stock options. This change prevented the controversy some companies are now facing over whether their workers are being misappropriated as contractors.

Honor has been providing software and services to independent home care agencies – the former competitors – since 2017. Honor provides these agencies with technology for nurse planning, training, and performance tracking, as well as a telephone support team. Gilmartin said Honor is directly employing thousands of these caregivers and is transferring them to Honor’s payroll as employees of outside agencies. Direct caregivers will continue to be hired as well.

According to CrunchBase, the company has raised a total of $ 115 million since its inception.

News website Axios previously reported that Japanese conglomerate SoftBank waived its commitment to invest $ 150 million in Honor in November after agreeing to provide funding last year.

Gilmartin declined to comment on the report, but said the company was “fully funded”. The company is supported by Naspers Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital. CEO Seth Sternberg previously started Meebo, a messaging app, and worked at Google.

Chase DiFeliciantonio is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: Chase.difeliciantonio@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ChaseDiFelice