Nabin Banskota chose a peculiar way to start selling payroll software. He waited. With his co-founders at Niural, he spent the early years building the financial machinery underneath the product. A young company was committing itself to tax engines, ledgers and payment rails before it had much opportunity to enjoy the reassuring sound of a customer saying yes. There are easier things to put in a pitch deck. There are certainly prettier ones.
That decision is the hinge of his career. Banskota had already worked inside Citi, helped build a consumer fintech business that Acorns acquired, and learned the commercial side of global payroll at TMF Group. He had seen money from several positions: inside a large institution, through a startup, and across an employer’s international operations. Niural brought those experiences into the same room. The question became how much of the machinery a new company should own.
Today, Banskota is Niural AI’s co-founder and president, based in New York. His company serves businesses across more than 150 countries. Yet the interesting part of his story begins before the scale, with a former finance executive choosing work that would take a long time to become visible. Payroll offers very little applause when it goes right. People tend to notice it at precisely the moment something goes wrong. That is an awkward business proposition, and a useful test of a founder’s appetite.
The comfort he decided to leave
Banskota has described leaving his Wall Street career in 2018 as a personal turning point. His CFO role was comfortable and stable. A decade at Citi had given him experience with global teams, regulatory complexity and the banking systems that carry money across borders. It had also given him access to the supporting apparatus of a large institution: lawyers, established systems and people whose job was to know the answer.
Entrepreneurship removed that apparatus. “Starting from scratch taught me resilience,” he recalled. The observation is modest, and more revealing than a heroic account of taking a leap. A senior title can conceal how many other people make senior work possible. Starting a business changes the arithmetic. Responsibilities that used to belong to departments arrive on one person’s desk, often before that person has worked out where the desk should go.
His departure did not erase the banker’s habits. It gave them a different setting. Financial visibility, the mechanics of a transaction and the consequences of a mistake recur in his public discussions of building companies. There is a continuity here: a person can leave an institution and still carry its useful disciplines into a smaller, less forgiving place. Banskota’s version of entrepreneurship has kept those disciplines close.
“Starting from scratch taught me resilience.”Nabin Banskota
A family business with something to brew
The route also passes through tea. Banskota helped build Nepal Tea Collective, a business connected to his family’s tea-growing history. His brother Nishchal has credited Nabin and their sister Pramila with providing initial investments. Their father began a tea garden in Nepal in 1984; their mother planted its first tea bush. The family supplied both the product and much of the early work that made selling it possible.
It is a pleasing interruption in a career otherwise crowded with finance vocabulary. Tea has to travel too, but the destination is a cup rather than a ledger. Nishchal’s account of the early business includes relatives helping with booths and talking to customers. That is a rather direct form of market research. A passerby either stops or keeps walking. No committee is required to interpret the result.
Banskota’s entrepreneurial interests span this physical business and his later software ventures. In a podcast conversation, he traced his journey from Nepal to the United States and discussed the lessons of entering business-to-business sales, where deals can involve long negotiations. “I always wanted to build something, do something, a little bit more entrepreneurial,” he said. The phrasing sounds like an inclination that preceded any particular business plan.
Harvest, before the AI rush
In 2018, Banskota and Nami Baral started Harvest. It used AI in consumer finance, helping people address debt and banking fees. Acorns acquired the company in 2021. For the pair, working with AI in a financial setting came before the broad public enthusiasm for conversational AI. They had already been dealing with a difficult combination: language, money and actions that have consequences for the user.
Baral became Niural’s co-founder and CEO; Banskota became its president. Their professional partnership also has a personal dimension. They are a married couple, and have spoken together about their startup journey on The Great Nepali Diaspora’s podcast. Banskota has also mentored participants in the group’s Nepal Venture Studio incubator. Building companies and helping other people begin them appear alongside each other in his public work.
An acquisition gives a founder a finished chapter. It does not necessarily provide the subject of the next one. Banskota’s experience at TMF supplied another view of global employment, including the sales and operational demands of serving companies in different jurisdictions. Consumer finance had brought him close to individual financial friction. Payroll put him beside the people responsible for paying a workforce. The recurring problem was how to connect an intention with a reliable transaction.
Two and a half years below the surface
Niural was founded in 2022. Its founding group included Baral, Banskota, Sarin Regmi and Brabim Baral. The company’s early approach put financial infrastructure at the centre: an internal general ledger, customer deposit accounts through partner banks, its own payroll tax engine and payout rails. NewView Capital describes the first two and a half years as a period devoted to that foundation. The timescale helps explain why patience matters so much in Banskota’s account.
He was making a bet about dependence. A payroll provider that relies on another provider’s core systems inherits some of that provider’s limits. Owning more of the underlying machinery means taking responsibility for more of it. It also gives the builder room to change how the parts work together. That tradeoff is central to understanding Niural’s design, rather than treating the company as a collection of features.
The picture is less glamorous than the phrase “AI company” suggests. There are records to reconcile and money to move, with the correct amounts going to the correct people. The interface is the part a customer sees. The ledger is where the business must keep its story straight. Banskota’s long preparation period makes sense when viewed from that end of the system: a convincing demonstration can arrive well before a dependable operation.
The paystub is the test
Banskota’s public conversations in 2024 show how widely he was looking for customers. On The Accountant Quits, he discussed global crypto payroll and the employer-of-record model. Niural’s users included web3 businesses such as Tensor and Alliance DAO. The setting was contemporary; the practical questions were familiar. How does someone become an employee? How does a company pay them when the company and the worker are in different countries?
That conversation moved through contractor hiring, payroll processing and withdrawing funds. Its attention to the paystub is instructive. Whatever technology carries the payment, the worker still needs a legible account of being paid. Employers have their own need for a record they can use. A new payment method adds options; it does not make the rest of employment administration disappear.
By December 2024, on The Doers Nepal podcast, Banskota was discussing another side of the same undertaking: raising money before a product is ready, building investor confidence and attracting a team. The unlaunched company must explain what its finished system could do while admitting, through the work still ahead, how much remains to be built. A founder choosing a lengthy construction period needs the ability to sell time as well as software.
The competition at the offsite
His New Year message for 2023 offered a smaller view of the company being assembled. He shared pictures from a team offsite in Nepal, thanked the people who had joined during 2022, and looked forward to another year. Then came the challenge: he wanted to compete with them again in push-ups, table tennis and badminton. The payroll founder had other scoreboards in mind.
The detail gives the early infrastructure story some people. Before there is a platform serving distant employers, there is a group learning to work together, with enough familiarity for its co-founder to announce a badminton rematch. His public account does not require an invented scene of late-night heroics. A brief invitation to play is sufficient. People building serious systems are allowed to have an unserious afternoon.
Nepal remained part of Niural’s operating geography as it grew. Banskota has described research and development hubs in Nepal and India, alongside teams in the United States and Canada. His own path across borders and the company’s distributed workforce give international employment a practical place in the story. The people making the product also work across some of the distances their customers have to manage.
Capital, with a longer deadline
Niural announced a $31 million Series A in 2025. In June 2026, it added $21 million in strategic capital, taking the Series A to $52 million. The newer financing included FOG Ventures and NewView Capital, with existing investors participating. Those figures describe company financing. They are useful here because they show the scale of the resources now attached to the founders’ original infrastructure decision.
The same June announcement introduced Niural AI Labs, a research arm focused on agents capable of managing complex work over time. Banskota put the intended benefit in terms of attention. “It is to return attention,” he said. That is a good ambition for a business whose customers must keep doing administrative work even when they would prefer to concentrate elsewhere. The value of a finished task includes the space it leaves in a person’s day.
The lab extends a question that runs through his career: what can software actually carry out reliably? Payroll provides a demanding place to ask it. There are deadlines, rules and people waiting for money. Banskota’s wager remains open to judgment in ordinary transactions, repeated over time. Years spent building the machinery earn their meaning there. The most persuasive result may be a payday that gives nobody a reason to think about the machinery at all.