We’ve seen a boom in the last several years around tech built for front-line, service, manual, and other workforces typically paid on an hourly wage. In one of the latest developments, Hourly.io — which has built an app that tracks working hours, generates payroll, and then calculates and assigns workers compensation insurance to individuals based on that — has closed in on $27 million in funding. Hourly.io is based in Palo Alto.

And according to the story on Yahoo News, Hourly now has some 1,000 customers – all in the state of California – in areas like construction, home services, accounting and retail, and will continue enhancing its product to target more verticals.

So what is Hourly going to do with the new $27 million in funding? “We’re planning to expand our insurtech platform outside the state of California and make it available to one-third of the U.S. population by the end of 2023. This is part of our larger vision to completely change the workers’ comp game – for good.”

Hourly says it is the first platform that lets employers run payroll, track time and attendance, and manage workers’ comp insurance premiums in one place. Why is this a good idea? “Basically by directly linking payroll and workers’ comp, premiums are based on your actual payroll – not a guess. Since we have a pay-as-you-go model, business owners only pay for the coverage they use every pay period.”

Hourly’s own birth came out of its founder’s own experiences. When Tom Sagi initially moved to the U.S., his first work experience was to help out in his family’s construction firm, where he was tasked with any and all odd jobs relating to admin and more. One of those involved handling payroll.

“We had 30-40 hourly employees, and I helped with everything on the business side including HR,” he recalled. “Every Friday the workers were paid, so I spent every Thursday collecting time cards in the field.” Working out workers comp insurance and payouts, he added, was a mandatory aspect of that, given the labor work involved.

“It was a headache to deal with,” he said. “What really should have only taken minutes to do took at least a day.” That was the impetus for building a platform to automate the process, from tracking time worked through to calculating payment and workers comp based on that.

Hourly’s rise is part of a bigger shift seen in tech built for the world of work. For the longest time, a lot of the most interesting innovations have been focused on so-called “knowledge workers” — those who typically get salaries, use computers and desks, and might well be paid much higher overall.

Hourly workers, however, have come into focus more recently for a number of reasons. Perhaps the strongest of these has been the communications and productivity evolutions arising from the ubiquity of smartphones.

Hourly.io is far from being the only startup tackling this general market, nor the specific task of fixing the very basic problems of organizing and paying these workers. Others that have raised money to grow their businesses include team management app Homebase; Fountain for sourcing and hiring hourly workers; another platform for matching shift workers to employers, Shiftsmart; Wagestream, a financial ‘super app’ for waged workers; When I Work to manage shift scheduling; and many others.

Like others in the insurance technology space, there remains a lot of room for automating and improving processes that have been barely touched for years. It also gives the company an interesting springboard to working across a wider range of products and services targeting waged workers, an opportunity those other startups are also tackling.

Hourly says that its revenues — based on two service tiers with varying levels of features for $40 plus $6/worker/month or $60 plus $10/worker/month — have been growing 20% month-over-month although it does not disclose actual revenue numbers.