Rajeev
Behera

At Disney's Burbank offices around 2011, a team of six people had zero revenue and a blank mandate: build the company's first free-to-play mobile gaming group. Rajeev Behera ran it. Thirty months later, they were 100 people and $22.5 million in revenue. One of those games - Marvel Avengers Alliance - cracked Disney's top 10 grossing mobile titles.

That's not the origin story Behera leads with anymore. The one he leads with now is the 30% figure: the fraction of his working hours, during eight years running Reflektive, that got swallowed by payroll, compliance, banking, tax filings, and the category of work that doesn't move a company forward by a single dollar. "This is the stuff that shouldn't keep founders awake at night," he's said, "and yet it kept me awake because I wasn't focused on what I needed to focus on to grow my company."

Reflektive was a serious company. Founded in 2013, it became the HR performance management platform of choice for mid-market tech firms - backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and TPG Growth. $100M+ raised. $20M ARR. 250 employees. Ranked 13th fastest-growing company in North America by Deloitte. Named a Top 50 SaaS CEO in 2018. By Silicon Valley's metrics, Behera had made it.

He sold Reflektive to Learning Technologies Group in 2021 and then did something most founders won't admit to: he stopped. For about two years. Burnout after eight years was real and he didn't pretend otherwise. It was a pause that - in a startup ecosystem allergic to admissions of exhaustion - reads more clearly in retrospect as the honest recalibration it was.

When Behera came back from his break and started Every in 2021, the premise was almost embarrassingly simple: founders hire engineers and sales people first. Nobody hires a CFO in month three. So the founder is the one doing payroll setup, bank account juggling, 83(b) election filing, and R&D tax credit research - tasks that take real hours and carry real risk if done wrong.

Every's answer is an integrated stack: banking, corporate cards, payroll, HR onboarding and benefits, bookkeeping, automated tax filing, compliance, and now free C-corp incorporation. Not a bundle of integrations. A single product where 78% of customers use the entire suite - a metric Behera quotes with the quiet confidence of someone who built a platform with genuine stickiness, not just a wide feature list.

The Y Combinator Summer 2023 batch was the inflection point. Every hit $1 million ARR in six months. About half of the customer base comes from within the YC alumni network - the highest-density concentration of early-stage tech startups on the planet. When Redpoint Ventures led a $22.5M Series A in September 2024, with Y Combinator, Okta Ventures, and Base10 Partners joining, it confirmed what the growth metrics already suggested: the bet was working.

The co-founder is Barry Peterson, who was previously head of engineering at Reflektive. The second-time partnership is deliberate: Behera knows what Peterson builds and how fast. When you're trying to ship banking plus payroll plus tax in one coherent product, that kind of existing trust compresses a lot of coordination cost.

Free incorporation is the newest and most aggressive move. The logic Behera describes is almost game-theoretic: give founders the entry point at zero cost, set them up with the entire back office in one click, and they won't think about alternatives when the real complexity arrives. Customers "don't even look at" competitors like Rippling once they've started with Every's incorporation and banking, he's noted.

The target segment is clear: startups under 200 employees, ideally in their first five years. Behera isn't trying to displace enterprise finance software. He's trying to eliminate the version of founder hell he personally experienced - the 2am compliance anxiety, the three separate logins, the CFO-shaped hole at a company that can't afford a CFO yet.

"Ironically, what used to keep me up at night worrying about is now what drives my passion and empathy for solving this for others." That sentence appears in his announcement of the Series A. It doesn't sound like a PR soundbite because it isn't one. It's the actual shape of his second act.

Behera graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Economics in 2004 and spent the next decade working his way through ad-tech and digital marketing roles at a procession of companies that were, almost without exception, acquired. Nextag, Adteractive (acquired by Next Internet), Like.com (acquired by Google), Tumri (acquired by Adobe). He was at the table when acquisitions happened - and that pattern keeps recurring.

The Disney chapter came via Playdom, a social gaming company Disney acquired. Behera joined what became Disney Interactive's mobile gaming group and built it from scratch. The Marvel Avengers Alliance success gave him scale experience at a company with Disney's resources - and the political complexity that comes with that. Running a 100-person P&L inside a media conglomerate is a specific kind of operating education: you learn to move fast inside a slow institution, and you learn what you'd do differently with fewer constraints.

Reflektive was the answer to that last question. Eight years as a CEO, from 2013 to 2021. The feedback and performance management space was crowded, but Behera and his team found a lane in continuous performance management - check-ins, real-time feedback, structured reviews - before it was standard practice. The a16z backing came early; the Deloitte recognition came after.