Before Lotanna Ezeike tried to redesign payroll, he learned to trust a clock. He was a sprinter, competing for England, where performance did not need a committee or a spreadsheet. The distance was fixed, the result was visible and the verdict arrived in fractions of a second. Later, as a creator, a banker and a founder, he entered systems where work could be finished while payment remained somewhere over the horizon. That delay became the loose thread he kept pulling.
Grade, the San Francisco company he co-founded with James Heaney, is the latest and most ambitious pull. The Y Combinator Winter 2026 startup describes itself as an API for performance-based payroll. Companies set the terms for completed tasks, delivered work or targets hit; Grade tracks the outcome, calculates what is owed, moves the money and handles the administrative debris around it. Think payroll after the timesheet has lost its monopoly.
The timing is deliberate. Creators may be paid by views. Contractors may be paid by deliverables. AI agents may be judged by tasks completed. The work is measured in outcomes, yet the payment operation often collapses into a spreadsheet, a manual approval and somebody in finance asking which version is final. Grade is a wager that the unit of pay is changing faster than payroll software has noticed.
A creator meets the waiting game
Ezeike was born in Nigeria and moved to South London at eight. He first attended Blackheath Bluecoat, then passed the 11-plus and went to Dartford Grammar School. His subjects included economics and Mandarin, which he has said he still speaks conversationally. The biography contains an early taste for systems: money, language, movement. It also contains a less orderly institution called Instagram.
He began posting there to encourage other athletes. The audience grew to roughly 10,000 to 12,000 followers, and brands began to call. At first, as a university student short on cash, free merchandise felt like a decent bargain. Then commercial offers arrived. So did the confusion: negotiations without a common structure, work posted long before invoices were paid, creators waiting 30, 60 or 120 days for money a brand had already benefited from.
At university he met Tomi Aiyeola, who worked with creators and saw the payment trouble from the other side. They eventually built XPO with Franck Ndame and Ahmad Karkouti. Its defining promise was wonderfully blunt: an influencer could request payment and receive it within 24 hours, while XPO waited for the brand to settle later. The first £3,000 came from Ezeike's mother. He has called it the only time he ever asked her for money. Founders often speak of friends and family rounds. His began, in essence, with family and an invoice.
Fundraising supplied its own education. Ezeike has said XPO heard no from 147 investors before one said yes. He then returned to the original group, explained that a commitment was in, and converted some of the rejections. The company went on to announce more than $1 million in seed funding and a waiting list above 2,000 people. His preferred summary of the episode is less about charisma than mileage: “I just kept knocking on doors until I found someone that would say yes.”
“I just kept knocking on doors until I found someone that would say yes.”Lotanna Ezeike, on raising for XPO
The banker inside the founder
Before XPO, Ezeike's first job was as a Barclays cashier. He advanced through the bank and later led product for digital payments. One story from those years has the crisp shape of a workplace comedy. He pushed digital adoption and faster customer interactions so hard that a branch manager asked him to slow down because improved efficiency was costing jobs. Ezeike took the request as a sign that his future sat elsewhere.
The bank gave him one side of the machinery. Creator work gave him the other. XPO connected them, but the connection did not spare him a founder's less photogenic chapters. He has publicly called an earlier creator tool a failure because it served the wrong customer. Creators were visible, culturally important and frequently broke. Many lacked steady income; those earning the most often needed little help. The product's users could neither pay consistently nor feel the problem often enough.
With Creator Check, he changed his target. Instead of building only for the people in front of the camera, he focused on talent managers and agencies behind them: operators handling 20 or more inboxes, chasing briefs, negotiating rates and keeping deals alive. He came to regard the inbox as the most underrated data source in the creator economy. Brand offers, negotiation history, pricing signals and payment delays were all there, hidden in threads. “The inbox holds the truth,” he wrote.
visible pain
recurring workflow
payment infrastructure
This is the useful scar in the Grade story. The company starts with creators, but the buyer is the organization paying them at scale. Marketing knows who performed. Finance knows what was spent. The gap between those teams contains manual work, tax questions and compliance risk. Ezeike's product is aimed squarely at the gap, where recurring pain and a budget can finally occupy the same room.
Four exits and one share button
Between payment companies, Ezeike became an unusually prolific small-software builder. He created two SaaS businesses in travel after encountering a visa problem, found buyers through Acquire.com and sold both back-to-back. He and Heaney also built and exited four mobile AI apps that, by their account, reached more than one million monthly active users together. Ezeike has said the sales produced more than $500,000 in total.
The portfolio taught him to distrust originality as a business plan. His later method began with markets where several apps were already earning meaningful revenue, proof that buyers existed. He built quickly, gave a single user value within 30 seconds, tested user-generated content at high volume and optimized for a clean sale instead of the highest theoretical bid. It is a merchant's philosophy of software: observe demand, make the object, find the counter and close.
Magic Music supplied his favorite distribution lesson. The AI song app moved when its share button let people send friends the ridiculous songs they had made about them. Users were not distributing a product pitch. They were distributing the joke. Ezeike concluded that distribution belongs inside the product from the beginning. A feature that creates a social artifact can outperform a marketing plan that merely describes one.
“Distribution isn't something you add later. It's something you design for from the start.”Lotanna Ezeike
The app exits mattered for a reason beyond proceeds. After his first startup failed, Ezeike has said he was rebuilding confidence, skill and the belief that he could ship something people wanted. The smaller bets offered quick, public evidence. His description is unusually free of founder varnish: “The real win was proving I could still build after failing publicly.” Success, in that telling, was psychological working capital.
The outcome enters payroll
Grade joins the chapters. At Barclays, Ezeike learned the constraints of moving money. At XPO, he learned that speed itself can be a product. Creator Check taught him to look behind visible talent for operational buyers. The app portfolio taught him to build and distribute quickly. Before Grade, he says, he managed more than $10 million in contractor payouts. The new company is less a pivot than a compression of accumulated annoyances.
Its launch argument begins with an economic mismatch. Payroll traditionally pays for time. Digital businesses increasingly define value through a completed task, a qualified lead, a delivered asset or a threshold of attention. Performance pay is already happening, but its rules live in cells and comments. Grade wants companies to integrate once, express those rules in software and pay people or agents anywhere when the stipulated result arrives.
At its Y Combinator launch, Grade said companies had used it to pay more than $380,000 to creators in 30 days, up 120 percent month over month. The numbers are early and the company is small. Their usefulness is concrete: real money has passed through the premise. Ezeike later wrote that relocating from London and joining YC improved Grade's environment, increasing the speed of feedback and validation. Even founders, it seems, can be performance-managed by geography.
Ezeike once described himself in three words: resilient, fun, ambitious. All three survive inspection. Resilience appears in the 147 rejections and the return after failure. Fun appears in products built to make people share dreadful songs about their friends. Ambition is now embedded in the word payroll, a category so enormous and unromantic that only a founder could find it glamorous.
There is a clean line from the track to Grade, though life supplied plenty of switchbacks between them. A sprinter learns that effort is private and the result is public. Ezeike spent the next decade discovering how many industries can observe the result while still struggling to pay for it. Grade is his attempt to make the second action follow the first with fewer meetings. Somewhere, an old stopwatch approves.