He helped robots drive people around San Francisco. Then he picked a harder problem: how those people get paid.
Peter McKee. Engineer, officer, founder. Currently at war with the comp spreadsheet.
Most companies treat compensation like weather. It happens to you once a year, everyone braces, and nobody quite knows where the numbers came from. Peter McKee looked at that annual storm and saw a system that had simply never been engineered. Aeqium, the company he co-founded and runs as CEO, is his answer: software that takes salaries, bonuses, equity, and benefits out of a sprawl of emailed spreadsheets and into one controlled, auditable place where managers and people teams can actually decide things on purpose.
The pitch is unglamorous on the surface and quietly radical underneath. Aeqium lets HR and finance teams run a full compensation cycle - planning raises, modeling equity, checking pay bands - without the version-chaos of forwarding a workbook around a company. Customers, the company says, have collectively retired more than 750 spreadsheets. That number is the whole thesis in miniature: every retired spreadsheet is a fire drill that didn't happen, a pay decision someone can now explain.
McKee is blunt about the stakes in a way HR software rarely is. The premise underneath Aeqium is almost rude in its honesty: people work for money, and when pay feels arbitrary or unfair, the best ones quietly update their resumes and leave. Subpar compensation, his investors note, is among the top reasons employees jump ship. So the problem isn't soft or sentimental. It's an operations problem - and operations is exactly what McKee spent a career learning to run.
Read his resume top to bottom and it looks like four different people. He studied computer science and engineering at MIT, leaving with both a bachelor's and a master's in electrical engineering and computer science. He wrote software at Bridgewater Associates and interned in finance at Coatue. Then the resume swerves: he served as a US Army officer, leading battalion current operations and overseeing combat-engineer work across nearly half of Afghanistan.
That detour is not a footnote. Running operations in a war zone is a crash course in making high-stakes decisions with incomplete data, under pressure, where the cost of a sloppy process is real. It's a strange but direct line to a software company whose entire promise is calm, controlled, well-documented decisions about money.
Back in tech, he joined Braze as one of its first ten employees, building backend APIs and data pipelines that chewed through billions of events so marketers could reach millions of mobile users. Braze went public in 2021. From there he went to Uber, where he founded and managed the team building early end-to-end self-driving rider experiences, and later ran the company's external API and partnerships engineering. He has, quite literally, shipped the experience of getting into a car with no human driving it.
Here's the part that amuses and informs in equal measure. A person who can build autonomous-vehicle features could have aimed his next act at anything shiny. McKee aimed it at the comp cycle - the most-dreaded, least-loved month on the HR calendar. The choice tells you how he thinks. He'd been a founding engineer, a product lead, and an engineering manager, which means he'd sat on every side of the pay conversation: the manager with no time and no data, the people team drowning in manual work, the employee wondering how the number got picked.
In November 2020 he co-founded Aeqium with Dwijen Patel (who had run engineering at Walmart's Intelligent Retail Lab and at Jet, after Palantir and Bloomberg) and Jared Katz (engineering at Jet, plus a finance background). The name nods at equity - the fairness kind, not just the stock kind. In March 2023 they announced a seed round led by Ridge Ventures and Vestigo Ventures, part of roughly $11.6M raised, with SHRM and Unusual Ventures later in the mix. The platform has since grown to include compensation AI, interactive offer letters, an employee portal, and pay-band tooling.
What makes McKee worth watching isn't a single grand gesture. It's the through-line: take a problem everyone treats as soft and political, and engineer it like infrastructure. He measures progress in spreadsheets eliminated. He talks about pay the way an operations officer talks about a mission - clarity, speed, confidence, no improvising under fire. For a function that has run on dread and guesswork for decades, that's a genuinely different temperament walking into the room.
McKee writes, too - regularly, and with opinions. His essays on Aeqium's blog read less like content marketing and more like field notes from someone who has watched comp season go sideways and wants to spare you. A sample of his headlines doubles as a tour of his thinking:
A rough read of where McKee has spent his professional energy - and why a comp platform run by this particular background feels less random than it first looks.
Before fixing payroll headaches, he helped build self-driving car features at Uber - and decided the comp spreadsheet was the better frontier.
He ran combat-engineer operations across nearly half of Afghanistan, then pointed that same operational discipline at how companies decide raises.
Aeqium's customers have collectively retired 750+ spreadsheets - the kind that quietly turn comp season into a company-wide fire drill.