Paul Kimani once had the sort of problem founders are trained to envy: a business that worked. His Nairobi software consultancy had paying customers, a team of roughly 20 and a habit of becoming the unofficial technology department for small and midsize companies. Clients asked for accounting tools, project management, customer records, payroll and then one more thing after that. The work kept arriving. So did the people required to deliver it.
Kimani could see the ceiling hiding inside the momentum. Every custom contract demanded more hands. A particularly good assignment might carry the company for months, but the next piece of growth began again with a sale, a specification and another small army. He wanted to build something that could move across Africa without his own calendar becoming its operating system.
Inside the consultancy sat TozzaPlus, a broad business-management product with modules for accounting, customer relationships, projects, HR and payroll. The accounting module attracted most of the early usage. It also invited comparisons with mature products and a punishing list of requests. The payroll corner had fewer customers and a clearer opening. Kimani's question was compact enough to fit on a sticky note: Can we win here?
“Can we win here?”Paul Kimani on choosing payroll
The product hiding in plain sight
Payroll had already followed Kimani through two very different workplaces. Before university, he spent about a year and a half at Equity Bank. Salary day there was structured: he knew when money would arrive and where to find the payslip. Later, while working in mechanical engineering, the routine could be vague. Payday was not always obvious. At one point, he was paid in cash. The contrast made an administrative function feel personal. A tidy payroll run is a quiet agreement between a company and the people who make it run.
There was also a market gap. Many smaller African employers still worked through spreadsheets, cash and disconnected systems. A product made for a large corporation was expensive and fussy; a global small-business tool often failed to account for local mobile money, taxes and labor rules. Kimani described the missing piece as a mobile-first payroll and HR product for smaller businesses. It sounded narrow. Across dozens of jurisdictions, it was anything but small.
Choosing payroll meant closing almost everything else. The consultancy paid bills. The broader product had users. Kimani gathered the team for a blunt reset: the old work would end, the company would concentrate on HR and payroll, and anyone willing to make that journey could stay. Five people did. His wife was among them. In 2025, he said four of the other members of that founding group were still at Workpay.
The counterintuitive choice
Illustrative share of early TozzaPlus use, based on Kimani's account. The smaller module offered the clearer competitive position.
The name arrived by reducing the mission to ordinary verbs. The team wanted to focus on how people work and how they get paid. Work plus pay. No Latin roots, no invented vowel, no expensive explanation. In 2019, Workpay emerged from the debris of the wider suite.
A founder assembled by detours
Kimani's route to that decision was pleasingly untidy. At the University of Nairobi, he studied electrical and electronics engineering because it was the closest available path to computers. He learned some coding and, in his third year, built what he later called a LinkedIn for politicians. The site profiled Kenyan candidates and their promises. He paused university for a year to run it. Then the election ended, taking the business model with it.
It was an early lesson in the danger of confusing an event with a market. Politicians were difficult customers. Revenue beyond the election had not been designed. Kimani returned to university, finished the degree and never practiced as an electrical engineer. Instead, he spent about a year managing heating, ventilation and air-conditioning projects for a mechanical engineering business working across Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda.
In 2015, with a wife, a young family and about six months of runway, he left employment. He began coding simple systems from home, hired one or two developers and watched the operation turn into the consultancy he would later close. Risk in Kimani's story rarely arrives as a cliff jump. It looks more like a series of doors shut carefully behind him.
Engineering, coding and a political-candidate platform that lasted one election cycle.
Left engineering employment and began a software practice from home.
Closed the consultancy, narrowed TozzaPlus to payroll and named the company Workpay.
Joined Y Combinator's Winter batch and raised a seed round during the pandemic.
Raised $5 million in a round led by Norrsken22, with Visa participating.
Fifty-four countries, many paydays
Workpay's challenge is concealed by its interface. A manager would like to add employees, approve leave, calculate salaries and make payments. Beneath those clicks sit currencies, tax authorities, statutory deductions, labor codes, bank accounts and mobile wallets. A payroll engine built for Kenya does not become Nigerian by changing a flag. Côte d'Ivoire introduces language and regulatory differences. South Africa brings another system. Africa may be one strategic region, but it refuses to be one spreadsheet.
The company's expansion method began with existing customers. If a client operating in one country hired in another, Workpay learned the new market while serving a real need. International customers sometimes arrived with workers spread across several countries at once. By the time the company formally sold in a market, it could already have payroll experience there. This made expansion less like planting flags and more like following footprints.
Workpay entered Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch with no referral, according to Kimani. The team arrived in California shortly before COVID-19 scattered the program. Back in Nairobi, he raised the company's $2.1 million seed round through video calls while in quarantine. It was useful capital at a dreadful moment: Workpay lost more than half of its young customer base as employers shut down or reduced staff, even as remote work brought a new group searching for cloud tools.
The company reported a $2.7 million round in 2023. In August 2024, it added $5 million in a round led by Norrsken22 with participation from Visa. At that point it served more than 1,000 customers across 20 African countries and had added nearly 500 businesses in 16 months. The offering had widened from payroll into HR, benefits, compliance, payments and services for companies employing people across borders.
“Things take longer than they seem.”Kimani's advice to early-stage founders
The operator after the leap
Closing a consultancy demanded conviction. Running a company of more than 100 demanded process, a less cinematic discipline. Kimani has spoken candidly about learning to build hiring stages, performance reviews, operating rules and clear departures. At five people, everyone can sit around one table and absorb the direction. At 100, alignment becomes work of its own.
His leadership lesson is an admission many founders postpone: he cannot be good at everything. Early confidence can make a chief executive feel capable of pulling the world into alignment. Scale introduces stubborn evidence. The useful question becomes what only the founder can do, followed by the harder one: who should do the rest?
Kimani can name his own delayed moves. Workpay launched payroll for remote teams in 2022; he believes 2020 would have been better. He wishes the company had moved beyond its first market sooner and installed people systems earlier. He also says products sometimes live longer than they deserve because killing them takes time. This is the same founder who once removed most of a product. Experience has not made subtraction painless.
The parts worth stealing
- Separate current traction from long-term advantage.
- Enter the next market through customers who already need you there.
- Budget two years for the work that looks like one.
- Build people systems before the table becomes too small.
Lately, Kimani's attention has widened to the future of African work. He writes about exporting work rather than workers, about payroll remaining local by default, and about what companies should do with the hours artificial intelligence returns. His concern is practical: a continent that needs millions of jobs also needs the productivity automation can bring. The useful outcome is not merely fewer hours on administration, but more capacity for products, customers and problems that had been neglected.
The aspiration beneath Workpay is infrastructure that connects African talent to opportunity and gives employers confidence that the unlovely details are handled. Kimani argues that the continent's young population can become an essential labor force for an aging world. That idea depends on a chain of prosaic promises: the contract is compliant, the taxes are right, the payslip exists and the money lands on time.
Founders enjoy stories about saying yes. Kimani's story turns on a series of well-chosen refusals: no to an election-bound first company, no to a mechanical engineering career, no to consulting as the final destination, no to the crowded accounting module, no to treating Africa as a copy-and-paste market. What remained was specific enough to sound boring and difficult enough to matter.
A good payday ends without applause. The employee checks a balance, the employer closes the month, and everybody returns to the work they were hired to do. For Workpay, invisibility is evidence. Kimani bet the company on that quiet moment.