A payroll company that pays in whatever the worker wants
Hugo Finkelstein spends his days on a problem most people never think about until it goes wrong: getting money to the people who earned it. His company, Rise, is a global payroll and compliance platform. A business in one country hires a contractor or employee in another, and Rise handles the payment and the paperwork - in local currency, in stablecoins, or in crypto, on the worker's terms.
That "whatever the worker wants" part is the whole idea. Rise calls it hybrid payroll, and Finkelstein has staked the company on the claim that it is not a fringe feature but the default global work is heading toward. In November 2025, Rise passed $1 billion in total payroll volume. Roughly half of that was added in the previous nine months. The company operates across more than 190 countries, with employer-of-record coverage expanding from 10 countries to 70 as it rolled out a product it calls Rise 2.0.
His argument to the crypto industry is blunt. Most of it has chased trading and speculation. He thinks the useful thing stablecoins actually do is pay people. It is a contrarian position stated plainly, and the volume numbers give it weight.
Cross-border teams now expect more than just payment. They expect freedom, speed, and choice.
It started as a Fiverr alternative. That version didn't work.
Rise launched around 2022, but not as a payroll company. The first version was an alternative to Fiverr and Upwork - a marketplace that used smart contracts to give independent contractors a better payment experience, cutting the steep commissions and the long waits that come with gig platforms.
After launching and raising a limited amount of capital, Finkelstein and his team realized the model was not sustainable. So they did the unglamorous thing: they interviewed customers. What surfaced was a bigger opportunity hiding inside the parts they had already built. The payment infrastructure and the compliance layer, aimed at companies hiring international talent, was the real product. That included web3 businesses staffing up and DAOs paying community contributors scattered around the world.
The pain point he kept hearing about was familiar to him from his own experience with contract work: "super long payment times and sometimes, a real lack of transparency." Rise rebuilt itself around fixing exactly that.
A dorm-room app and a roommate's tip about Bitcoin
Before any of this, Finkelstein was a student at Babson College, where he launched his first venture - an app that let students buy, sell, and exchange goods on campus. It was there that a roommate introduced him to Bitcoin and Ether. What pulled him in was not the price. It was the idea that you could "disintermediate transactions, especially within a peer-to-peer context." Take the middleman out and let value move directly.
That interest turned into a career when he reconnected with an angel investor who was starting a cryptocurrency exchange. Finkelstein brought marketing and community-building skills, working across a range of blockchain projects and co-founding the crypto venture LGO. The through-line from a campus trading app to a global payroll network is that same peer-to-peer instinct, applied at larger and larger scale.
Hybrid payroll isn't a niche trend. It's the future of global work. The next trillion dollars of workforce payments will be hybrid, and Rise is leading that transformation.
For a worker in Buenos Aires, the currency is the point
Finkelstein points to economically stressed regions like Argentina and Brazil as some of the clearest cases for what Rise does. In places where local currency can lose value between payday and the grocery store, a stablecoin payout is not a novelty. It is a way to hold onto the value of a paycheck. The pitch there writes itself: get paid in something that does not evaporate.
He is also targeting more traditional businesses with distributed teams - software development agencies, gaming companies - that need to pay people in many countries without building a global finance department. The Series A in November 2024, a $6.3 million round led by Draper Associates and Polymorphic Capital with participation from DCG, JAM Fund, Ryze Labs, and Paradigm Shift Capital, was earmarked for exactly the boring, hard part: expanding the team, launching products, and growing compliance and licensing infrastructure, including money transmitter licenses. Tim Draper summed up his bet in a line: "Rise is the bridge to a crypto economy and everything in between."
A partnership with Circle, announced in 2025, pushed to make USDC a normal way to run payroll rather than an experiment. Underneath it sits the RiseID, an on-chain identity that Finkelstein describes as "the connecting tissue of an ever more modular HR, Finance ecosystem." More than 100,000 have been minted.
Soccer, mixology, and satisfied contractors
Away from the company, Finkelstein follows sports and plays soccer regularly. He has taken mixology classes and keeps a close eye on emerging technology, including AI. Ask what gives him the most satisfaction, though, and it is not the funding or the volume charts. It is Rise's team culture and hearing from customers and contractors who got paid efficiently, without the wait he set out to eliminate.
That is a modest answer for someone running a company processing over a billion dollars, and it fits the pattern of the whole story. The flashy version of crypto was never the draw. The draw was a specific, stubborn problem - people not getting paid properly - and a conviction that the technology could finally fix it.
The volume curve that bent
Cumulative payroll processed through Rise, per company milestones. Bars scaled to the $1B mark for readability.