The startup back office - accounting, payroll and HR - packaged as a service you subscribe to instead of a department you build.
A San Francisco company in a hurry: two of the founder's businesses, one services shop and one software shop, folded into a single name and pointed at the least glamorous problem in any startup - keeping the books honest.
Here is a fact about running a company that nobody tells you when you start one: somebody has to do the accounting. Not the fun, strategic, "should we raise a round" accounting - the other kind. The kind where receipts get reconciled, payroll gets run on the right Friday, benefits get administered, and a tax filing shows up on time whether or not anyone in the building enjoys tax filings. Founders are famously bad at this, partly because it is genuinely tedious and partly because the moment it becomes urgent - due diligence, an audit, a missed payroll - is exactly the moment you have no time to fix it.
HireAthena's entire proposition is that this problem should be somebody else's. The company sells the back office as a service: a remote team of finance and HR people, sitting on top of workflow software, doing the reconciling and the running-of-payroll and the administering-of-benefits so that the people who started the company can go back to starting the company. You do not hire a bookkeeper, a payroll administrator, an HR person and a tax preparer. You hire HireAthena, and HireAthena hires them - or, more precisely, HireAthena has already hired them and is renting their time to you and to everyone else who has the same problem, which is nearly everyone.
It is a fundamentally unsexy business, which is part of why it is interesting. The glamorous version of a startup builds a product that consumers love. The HireAthena version notices that a million small companies all quietly need the same boring thing, and builds the machine that delivers it. There is no consumer to delight here. There is only a founder at 11pm who does not want to be doing this, and a company that will do it for them.
The numbers are modest by the standards of a company that wants to be a headline, and that is the point. HireAthena is not a business that needs to raise nine figures to work; it needs clients who would rather pay a monthly fee than hire and manage a finance team. The capital that came in - a seed round, then a $7M Series A in 2013 with Google Ventures in the mix - was there to build the software and the workforce, not to subsidize customers into existence.
HireAthena is what you get when someone who has personally lived the problem decides to industrialize the solution. Kristen Koh Goldstein studied at Cornell and Harvard Business School, worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, and became a serial "tech CFO" - the person startups call when their finances are on fire. She had, over the years, three children and a working theory: that there was an enormous pool of skilled talent, much of it mothers who had stepped back from full-time work, sitting idle because the jobs on offer did not fit their lives.
So she built the jobs. In 2010 she founded BackOps, a "web-enabled, paperless back office" for small and medium businesses, staffed largely by remote workers who wanted flexibility and got, unusually for distributed work at the time, a real salary, a 401(k), and medical, dental and vision coverage. In 2013 she started a second company, Scalus, which made the workflow software that let a distributed team do finance work with standardized quality and audit-ready records.
In 2016 she did the obvious thing, which is only obvious in retrospect: she merged them. BackOps had the people. Scalus had the software. Neither is quite enough on its own - software does not close your books, and people do not scale without software - so she combined them into a single company, HireAthena, and pointed it at the market.
The social mission is not a footnote bolted onto the business; it is the labor supply. HireAthena's stated goal of bringing "one million moms back to work" is also, conveniently, a strategy for sourcing motivated, skilled workers who value flexibility over a corner office. That alignment - do good, get talent - is the quietly clever part.
Hire slow and fire fast.
The pitch to a customer is simple: instead of stitching together a bookkeeper, a payroll provider, an HR consultant and a tax firm - and then coordinating all of them yourself - you get one team and one executive dashboard for approvals, expenses and payroll. Here is what lives inside it.
Day-to-day bookkeeping, monthly financials and financial reporting, handled by a dedicated remote team rather than a founder's spreadsheet.
Payroll processing and administration, run on schedule and wired into the same dashboard as everything else.
People operations plus benefits administration - FSA, 401(k) and the paperwork nobody wants - managed end to end.
Tax preparation and management with top-tier partners, so filings are handled by people who do them all day.
Back-office and fund-admin support aimed at micro-funds and emerging managers who need real books without a real staff.
The former Scalus platform underneath it all - rapid onboarding of remote staff, standardized quality and full audit compliance.
| Round | Amount | Date | Notable Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | ~$1.65M | Oct 2012 | Google Ventures, CrunchFund, e.ventures, DCVC |
| Series A | $7.0M | Jul 2013 | ACME, Headline (e.ventures) |
| Total | $8.65M | 2012-2013 | 8 investors across the BackOps / Scalus lineage |
Figures compiled from public sources (Crunchbase, PitchBook, Tracxn); the seed amount is approximate. Across the BackOps and Scalus lineage, early angels reportedly included Naval Ravikant, Max Levchin and Mark Pincus.
A rough illustration of where an early-stage founder's back-office time tends to go - and why handing it off is an easy trade. (Illustrative, not a HireAthena statistic.)
The insight underneath HireAthena is that all of these are recurring, rules-based, and awful to do sporadically. They reward specialization and standardization - exactly what a shared team running shared software can provide, and exactly what a founder improvising alone cannot.
Kristen Koh Goldstein launches a web-enabled, paperless back office for small and medium businesses.
Early capital arrives with backers including Google Ventures and CrunchFund.
A Series A led by ACME and Headline brings total funding to $8.65M. Scalus, the workflow-software company, is also founded this year.
BackOps and Scalus merge and relaunch as HireAthena, an on-demand accounting and HR marketplace.
Back-office approvals and notifications move into the channels teams already use.
The customer base skews toward the people who feel the back-office pain most and can afford it least in headcount: high-growth startups, non-profits, micro-funds, consultancies and local small-to-medium businesses, typically somewhere between one and fifty-plus employees. These are organizations with real finance needs and no budget for a full-time CFO, controller and HR lead - the exact gap HireAthena fills.
Internally, the culture is remote-first by design, not by accident. The workforce is distributed, flexible, and - unusually for the on-demand era - benefited: salary, retirement, health coverage. The company's framing is that flexibility and professionalism are not opposites, and that a lot of very good finance people would rather work from home with real benefits than commute to a job that pays the same and asks more.
HireAthena has really allowed us to focus on the growth of our operations. They're a part of our team.
It provides outsourced back-office services - accounting, bookkeeping, payroll, HR, benefits, tax and fund administration - delivered by a remote workforce running on its own workflow software, all managed from a single executive dashboard.
Yes. It began as BackOps in 2010 and relaunched as HireAthena in 2016 after merging with the founder's workflow-software company, Scalus.
Kristen Koh Goldstein, a former Goldman Sachs analyst and serial "tech CFO," is the founder and CEO. BackOps' early co-founders also included Mark Goldstein and Bob Hiller.
About $8.65M across a seed round and a $7M Series A in 2013, from investors including Google Ventures.
High-growth startups, non-profits, micro-funds and small-to-medium businesses that need real finance and HR support but aren't ready to build a full in-house department.
Profile compiled from public sources including the company website, VentureBeat, Business Wire, Crunchbase, PitchBook, Tracxn and SaaStr. Figures are as reported and may be approximate.