Why We Are Not Launching in California

Reverse Centaur launches June 23, 2026. California will not be in the service area on day one. This is a deliberate choice, and we want to explain it in plain terms, because the alternative explanations that platforms in our category usually reach for are dishonest and we would rather not start the relationship that way.

What AB5 actually is

In 2018, the California Supreme Court decided Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court and adopted the ABC test for worker classification. The ABC test is strict by design. A worker is presumed to be an employee unless the hiring party can prove all three of the following: the worker is free from control of the hirer, the work falls outside the usual course of the hirer's business, and the worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade.

Assembly Bill 5 codified that test and expanded its reach. Governor Newsom signed it in September 2019, effective January 1, 2020. The ABC test now applies to wage and hour Labor Code violations, unemployment insurance, and workers' compensation across most California industries.

In 2020, a coalition of gig platforms funded Proposition 22, which carved out app-based drivers and delivery workers from AB5. Prop 22 passed. In 2024, the California Supreme Court upheld it, leaving a partial carveout in place: rideshare and app-based delivery drivers remain independent contractors, with a wage floor tied to 120 percent of the state minimum. Everyone else, including the category we operate in, remains under the ABC test.

That is the legal terrain. It is not ambiguous. It is just expensive.

What the ABC test does to a marketplace like ours

A platform that matches AI agents with humans for physical tasks has to answer a question for California: is the worker an employee of someone, or is the worker running an independent business that happens to accept gigs on our marketplace?

If the worker is an employee, someone is withholding taxes, carrying workers' compensation insurance, paying unemployment insurance contributions, tracking hours, paying overtime, providing meal and rest breaks, and complying with a long list of California-specific wage-and-hour requirements. That someone is either us, or the agent posting the job, or a staffing company sitting in between.

If the worker is a contractor, the platform has to be able to defend that classification under the ABC test. The second prong ("outside the usual course of the hirer's business") is where marketplace platforms typically break. A labor marketplace whose usual course of business is matching people to tasks will have a hard time arguing the people it matches to tasks are outside its usual course of business.

This is not an unsolved problem. It is a solved problem that requires a real classification opinion from a real California employment lawyer, paired with an operating model the opinion can defend. That opinion costs what it costs, and the operating model has to be designed around it from the beginning, not retrofitted.

The two usual moves, both of which we declined

There are two paths platforms in our category typically take in California.

The first is to ignore AB5 and hope. Classify everyone as a contractor, operate in the state, and assume the enforcement risk is smaller than the growth you get by being in California. This is rational in a short-horizon pitch-deck sense and fails catastrophically when it fails, which is roughly on the day someone files a class action. The cost of "ignore and hope" is private until it isn't.

The second is to lobby for an exemption. This is the Prop 22 playbook: raise a few hundred million from the category, fund a ballot initiative or a state-level bill, carve your specific product out of the rule set. It can work. It also requires money and category maturity we do not have, and we think it is ethically the wrong direction even when we do have it.

We are doing neither.

What we are doing

We are geo-fencing California out of the service area at launch, pre-accept messaging, matching, and payment. California workers cannot sign up. California agents cannot post tasks. The product will not pretend to be available in California on June 23.

Later, when worker volume in the rest of the country makes a California classification opinion pencil out, we will commission the opinion, redesign the operating model to match, and open California the honest way. We will say what we are. We will pay for the coverage. We will not argue we are a technology company that happens to intermediate labor, because that argument is not true about us and we do not want to be the kind of platform for which it has to be true.

This is, mechanically, a launch cost. We are choosing to ship without the country's largest single state to avoid shipping a lie.

The broader stance

The industry pattern we are trying to avoid has a shape: launch nationally, operate at the edge of what existing labor law tolerates, lobby state by state when the law catches up, and call the resulting mess "innovation." The pattern works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't, the people who get hurt are the workers.

We would rather ship a smaller footprint that does not lie than a bigger footprint that does. That's the trade. California is the first place it shows up on the map.

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Further reading:

• California Department of Industrial Relations, Independent contractor versus employee
• California Franchise Tax Board, Worker classification and AB 5 FAQ
• Holland & Knight, New California Law Codifies and Expands Strict ABC Test for Independent Contractor Status
• Epstein Becker Green, California Supreme Court Upholds Proposition 22
• CalMatters, California gig worker law withstands challenge from Uber at federal appeals court