Homebase Earns Spot on Fast Company’s 2025 Best Workplaces for Innovators North America

Recognition underscores Homebase’s commitment to building AI-powered solutions that save time and help small business teams thrive

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Fast Company today announced its seventh annual Best Workplaces for Innovators North America list, recognizing businesses that foster a culture of innovation across all levels. Homebase, the all-in-one platform for small business team management, hiring, and payroll, earned a spot for its forward-thinking use of AI, developing tools that drive innovation across the organization and external solutions that help small businesses save time, reduce costs, and better support their employees.

The 2025 Best Workplaces for Innovators North America lists winners across industries such as entertainment, biotech, consumer packaged goods, marketing, education, and healthcare. To be considered, applicants detailed their investment in innovation, internal programs, and company culture. Final selections were made by Fast Company’s editors, who evaluated every application and conducted extensive research to generate a score for each company. A distinguished panel of judges then reviewed the top-rated companies.

“We’re thrilled to be honored as one of the Best Workplaces for Innovators, a testament to our relentless focus on building smarter, simpler tools that give small businesses a competitive edge,” said John Waldmann, CEO of Homebase. “At Homebase, innovation is centered around building technology that makes life easier for small business owners and their teams. This award is a celebration of the work our team is doing to innovate, building internal tools that empower our people and the external solutions that remove work for small businesses, helping them to grow and thrive.”

Homebase’s commitment to innovation has been reaffirmed through its own journey to become an AI-native organization. What started with company-wide hackathons in early 2023, has become the core way that Homebase operates in 2025. The company has leveraged AI tools across the way it designs, builds, and tests its products, leveraging AI for faster prototyping, customer insights and feedback. The team has built bespoke AI agents for a wide range of internal activities, from sales training to customer onboarding to performance reviews. Homebase has built a culture of experimentation and learning that touches every team in the company, and built AI excellence into company and individual goals.

From this foundation of learning, Homebase has introduced its first AI-powered Hiring Assistant and Scheduling Assistant, tools designed to transform how small businesses manage their teams. These solutions automate time-consuming tasks like writing job descriptions, screening applicants, scheduling interviews, and building optimized shift schedules, helping owners save hours each week. Tailored to the unique needs of small businesses, the assistants deliver practical, accessible AI that reduces costs, improves team satisfaction, and frees owners to focus on growth.

“Each year, we’re inspired by the companies and leaders who prove that innovation doesn’t happen by accident—it’s the result of intentional choices to empower people at every level,” says Brendan Vaughan, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “The organizations on this year’s Best Workplaces for Innovators list show that when you build a culture where creativity and risk-taking are valued, breakthrough ideas inevitably follow.”

The full list of honorees is available at https://www.fastcompany.com/91390688/north-america-best-workplaces-for-innovators-2025.

The Fast Company Best Workplaces for Innovators issue (Fall 2025) is available online now and will hit newsstands on September 23.

About Fast Company
Fast Company is the only media brand fully dedicated to the vital intersection of business, innovation, and design, engaging the most influential leaders, companies, and thinkers on the future of business. Headquartered in New York City, Fast Company is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, along with fellow business publication Inc. For more information, please visit fastcompany.com.

About Homebase
Our mission is to make small business teams unstoppable.

Homebase is the everything app for hourly teams, with employee scheduling, time clocks, payroll, hiring, communication, HR, and more. More than 100,000 small (but mighty) businesses rely on Homebase to make work radically easy and give their teams superpowers. As the leader in small business team management, Homebase tracked 1+ billion hours for 2.5+ million workers last year. Homebase was named a 2024 Fast Company’s Brands That Matter and is a 2025 Webby Award winner.

Homebase is based in San Francisco, Houston, Denver, and Toronto. We are backed by leading venture investors L Catterton Growth, Emerson Collective, Notable Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Baseline Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Bedrock Capital, and PLUS Capital.