Rick Hammell started a company around his dining table in Chicago. The problem that brought people to that table was less romantic than the usual startup creation myth: somebody, somewhere, needed to be paid. A company could find an employee overseas, agree on a salary and still struggle to get the employment machinery working. Talent travelled through the internet rather more easily than payroll travelled through the institutions built to handle it.
In 2015, he founded Elements Global Services, the business later renamed Atlas. His answer was to build a network of legal employers across countries, giving clients a way to hire without establishing every local entity themselves. By 2022, Atlas had attracted a Series B investment commitment of up to $200 million. For a venture that began among the dining chairs, this was a considerable change in the seating arrangements.
Then came a decision that complicates the tidy success story. Hammell stepped away from the CEO job in 2023. He wanted to build again. Today he leads Globalli, formerly Helios, pursuing the problems that remain after a company makes its first international hire. His career has become a series of increasingly demanding questions about what happens between offering someone a job and making that job work.
The trouble with the last mile
Before he was selling an answer, Hammell had been the customer who needed one. As an HR leader managing international employees, he found that existing arrangements could be expensive, slow and opaque. Working through providers did not necessarily give him the local understanding or control he needed. His conclusion was practical: owning the employing entities would allow his business to take a more direct role.
An employer of record becomes the legal employer for a client’s workers in a given country. The client can direct the work while the EOR handles employment administration. Atlas built its proposition around a direct model, with its own entities, rather than arranging the entire service through a chain of other providers. The distinction mattered to Hammell because it addressed the handoffs he had already encountered.
The business idea has an appealingly literal quality. If the obstruction sits inside the employment infrastructure, build the infrastructure. The result may look like software to the buyer, but a screen cannot conjure local knowledge into existence. Someone still has to understand how the arrangements work where the employee lives. Hammell’s original wager combined the platform with people who could answer those questions.
A simplified explanation of the model, rather than a contractual diagram.
A bigger map, a different calendar
The company’s development can be followed through its names and its financing. Elements Global Services raised $20 million from Guidepost Growth Equity in 2020. In June 2022, it became Atlas and introduced its HXM platform. The name suggested geography; the software brought global people operations into a common interface. By then, the business was moving beyond the scale of a founder personally untangling a client’s difficulties.
That September, Sixth Street Growth committed an investment of up to $200 million. The stated uses included international expansion and further development of the platform. Baird, which advised Atlas on the round, described a capital-raising process conducted in volatile markets. Behind the headline number sat the less photogenic work of sales, technology development and supporting an organization with customers spread across borders.
The growth also changed the founder’s working day. An enterprise needs governance and investment decisions; neither disappears because its founder prefers customers. The question is how much of a person’s time those obligations should consume. Hammell would eventually decide that the version of the job he had created was taking him further from the work he wanted to do.
- 2015Elements Global Services begins.
- 2022The Atlas name and HXM platform arrive.
- 2023Hammell leaves the CEO role.
The meeting that changed his mind
Hammell’s account of leaving Atlas contains a revealing complaint about his calendar. He was spending more time with the board and investors than with customers. The company he had built still mattered to him, but running it had become a different assignment. He asked whether he was the right person to take it into its next stage.
“It took a lot of humility, I will say,” he recalled. There is no particularly graceful way to ask yourself that question. Founders spend years persuading other people that they should be trusted with a business. Deciding that someone else should run it requires a different kind of persuasion, directed inward.
His August 2023 announcement placed him in the chairman’s seat and pointed toward new ventures in workforce technology. Jim McCoy was appointed Atlas CEO that December. Hammell’s next venture was Helios. He had found a reason to start over within the field he knew, rather than treating the previous company as the final version of his idea.
“It took a lot of humility, I will say.”
Rick Hammell, on leaving Atlas’s CEO role
When a local answer becomes a global habit
Hammell’s personal connection to the work goes beyond the satisfaction of solving a payroll problem. He initially wanted to be a writer and studied journalism before changing direction toward business and HR. In his own account, entrepreneurship also had family precedent: his father and grandfather owned businesses. His later book, Getting Sh*t Done!: The Millennial CEO, gives the aspiring writer a fairly unmistakable entrance.
One of his more instructive stories concerns a visit to his team in Brazil. He had regarded the international mix of employees as evidence of diversity. An employee challenged him: the makeup of that local team did not reflect diversity within Brazil. He says he contacted HR before boarding his flight and began reconsidering how the business approached the issue.
The usefulness of the anecdote lies in its awkwardness. A global employer can measure its workforce through categories that make sense at headquarters and still miss what matters in a particular office. Hammell tells the story with himself on the receiving end of the correction. It gives his insistence on local knowledge a consequence beyond contracts: the person running the company has to keep learning, too.
A passport is a poor hiring test
Hammell speaks English and Spanish, and he has argued that English fluency should not become an automatic proxy for a candidate’s ability to do a job. His hiring advice includes using interview panels with different cultural perspectives and making room for conversations in different languages. A company that says it wants access to global talent has to decide how it will recognize that talent.
He has also warned about asking employees in other time zones to behave as though everyone shares headquarters’ clock. The practical point is easy to overlook: an international workforce cannot become international only on the recruitment slide. Managers have to account for where their colleagues are and how the working day feels from there.
His connection to Chicago has included service on the board of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metropolitan Chicago, documented in the organization’s 2023 board listing. The detail belongs beside his business career because opportunity runs through both. The commercial version concerns access to work across countries. The community version places him in an organization built around mentoring young people closer to home.
Leaving room for the second draft
The former journalism student has had to revise his ideas about building technology as well. In a 2024 interview, Hammell described moving away from an insistence on a flawless first product toward incremental improvements and feedback. He had learned that a product could develop through successive versions, and that the team needed space to make those versions.
That admission fits a career in which the solution keeps expanding. The original concern was direct employment. The next venture addressed the wider process of managing international teams. Changing the scope demands more than attaching another feature to an old pitch; it requires accepting that the founder’s understanding will change as customers encounter new problems.
His advice to younger entrepreneurs is to seek mentorship early. There is something pleasing about a founder whose book title sounds like an instruction barked across a room also recommending that people ask for help. The two impulses can coexist. Getting the work done includes finding someone who can tell you which work deserves doing, and where your first answer falls short.
What happens after the first hire?
Globalli’s founding rationale starts where a narrowly defined EOR service ends. A business may need support before entering a market and again after its operations have grown beyond its original employment arrangements. Hammell’s new company aims to handle that broader journey, bringing HR, payroll, payments and different kinds of workers into a shared system.
Helios announced $15.5 million in funding in March 2025. Later that year, it acquired ConnectaVerse, adding capabilities around entity setup, governance and international compliance. The acquisition was finalized in August and announced in September. ConnectaVerse founder Isidro Helder joined as chief revenue officer, bringing another founder’s experience into Hammell’s next business.
The following month, Helios announced its rebrand as Globalli. The company described a platform spanning more than 125 countries and called its approach a Global People Operating System. The ambition is to give HR and finance teams a consistent way to work while accommodating the local differences that make global employment difficult in the first place. That is a demanding promise; the useful measure will be how the system behaves when those differences arrive.
Globalli’s announced platform coverage at its October 2025 rebrand. A different business and measure from Atlas’s earlier geographic reach.
The spreadsheet still has an opponent
In September 2026, Globalli announced a certified integration with Workday through Global Payroll Connect. The arrangement is designed to move workforce data into Globalli for payroll processing and return payroll results to Workday. It addresses a familiar enterprise situation: a company already has a core HR system and wants its international payroll to work with it.
For Hammell, the development brings the story back to its starting problem. His current work still concerns the awkward space between having employee information and paying people correctly across countries. The tools and partners have changed; the desire to remove unnecessary handoffs remains recognizable.
A dining table can accommodate a small founding team. A global business requires rather more furniture, and eventually a founder has to choose where to sit. Hammell chose to return to building. The interesting part of his story is that he keeps meeting the same practical obligation at a larger scale: an employee has done the work, and the machinery should let the employer keep its promise.