The Lagos startup, part of Y Combinator's W22 batch, took the most dreaded Monday of the month - paying people - and turned it into a task you finish before your coffee cools.
Ask any founder in Lagos what they like least about running a company and payroll will come up fast. It is the recurring appointment nobody enjoys: reconcile the spreadsheet, calculate the tax, remember the pension, transfer each salary by hand, then hope you did not fat-finger an account number. Everyone notices when it goes wrong. Nobody thanks you when it goes right. Eazipay was built for exactly that appointment.
Founded in Lagos in 2021 and accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, Eazipay is a payroll and payment automation platform aimed squarely at African businesses. The pitch is almost aggressively simple: run payroll in about five minutes. Salaries, taxes, pension, insurance and the rest of the statutory alphabet - handled in a single run, from one screen.
At its core, Eazipay is cloud payroll software. A business loads its team, sets salaries, and the platform does the arithmetic that usually eats an afternoon: gross-to-net, tax deductions, pension contributions, and the various statutory payments that differ from one line item to the next. When the numbers are ready, it moves the money - each salary to each worker, each deduction to the right authority.
Two things make that more than a calculator. First, compliance. The company says it processes up to eight distinct payroll payment types, from tax and pension through to insurance, routed through its own payment infrastructure. Second, distribution. Eazipay does not only sell an app to employers; it also offers a payroll API that neobanks and commercial banks can embed, extending the same engine to the SMEs already banking with them.
Eazipay's customers are African startups and small-to-medium businesses - and, indirectly, the people those businesses pay. Company materials describe thousands of businesses on the platform, including a number of other Y Combinator companies. The API line, sold through banks, is pitched as a way to reach tens of thousands more without Eazipay having to knock on every door itself.
The early trajectory tells the more honest story. Eazipay reportedly went from roughly ten businesses at the start of one year to hundreds within months. That is the tell of a product solving a recurring pain: payroll happens every month, so a tool that removes the pain gets used every month, and customers who stop churning start compounding.
Payroll in much of Africa has defaulted to spreadsheets, manual bank transfers, and an accountant who remembers which remittance is due when. It works until it does not - until a tax filing is late, a pension contribution is missed, or a growing team turns a 20-minute chore into a half-day ritual with real penalties attached for getting it wrong.
That problem is unglamorous, which is precisely why it stayed open. Flashier fintech went after cards and wallets. Eazipay walked through the door marked tedious and made compliance the point rather than an afterthought.
Eazipay is often shorthanded as "Gusto for Africa," which gets the shape right and the geography wrong. Global payroll tools assume infrastructure - tax APIs, standardized filings, banking rails - that does not exist uniformly across African markets. Eazipay's answer was to build its own payment infrastructure underneath, so the eight payment types move without depending on rails that may not be there.
The second difference is the two-sided wedge. Selling directly to employers builds the product; licensing the API to banks buys distribution. Banks do not want to build payroll, and employers do not want to run it - Eazipay sits in the middle, selling the app to one side and the plumbing to the other.
The catalogue has widened since launch. Alongside core payroll and the bank-facing API, Eazipay added financial-wellness tools including early wage access - letting workers draw earned pay before payday. It sounds like a perk; for someone two weeks out from a salary, it is closer to oxygen, and putting it next to the payroll button was a deliberate choice.
The business is B2B: subscription and per-transaction fees on payroll and salary payments, plus licensing when a bank embeds the API. Adjacent revenue comes from the financial-wellness and lending products built on top of the payroll flow - once you sit between an employer and its workers every month, you are well placed to offer more than a transfer.
CEO Asher Adeniyi came to payroll by way of hiring: before Eazipay he founded Gidijobs, a Nigerian jobs site. There is a neat logic to the arc - first help people find work, then make sure they actually get paid for it. He co-founded Eazipay with Kingsley Michael and Efosa Uwoghiren, whose backgrounds run through machine learning, data science and product.
The team is small and Lagos-based, in the low-to-mid twenties by most counts. That is a lean crew for infrastructure that moves other people's salaries, which is either a sign of discipline or the reason the roadmap stays focused. Probably both.
Eazipay sits in African HR-fintech, in a lane with names like Bento, SeamlessHR and Workpay, and measured against global reference points such as Gusto and Deel. But the real incumbent is the status quo: the spreadsheet, the manual transfer, the accountant with a good memory. Most of the market has not switched to software yet, which is the opportunity and the challenge in the same sentence.
The bet underneath it all is that payroll is not a feature but infrastructure - the quiet layer that moves salaries, pensions and taxes while everyone sleeps. Done properly, you never notice it. Eazipay is building for that kind of invisibility, in a market that has been waiting for someone to make paying people boring again.