Sagar
Khatri.

The Ten-Month Bank Account

Sagar Khatri runs Multiplier, which does a boring and slightly heroic thing. If your company in San Francisco wants to hire a designer in Lisbon, or a data engineer in Nairobi, or a customer-success manager in Buenos Aires, you have historically had two options. You could set up a local legal entity, retain a local law firm, open a local bank account, and file with a local tax authority. This takes, in his telling, up to a year. Or you could pay the person as a contractor and hope nothing goes wrong with the local labor board. Both options are bad. Multiplier is a third option: it employs the designer, engineer, or manager on your behalf, in the country they live in, and bills you.

This is called employer of record, or EOR, and it is not a category Khatri invented. Deel and Remote are larger, better known, and much older only in the sense that they started a couple of years earlier. But Multiplier now operates in more than 150 countries, and its customer list runs, per Forbes, from Amazon and Uber down to companies with fewer than a dozen people. Same product. Same promise: hire globally, on Monday.

The founding story is unusually literal. Khatri was, until 2020, the VP of corporate development at Hmlet, a Singapore-based co-living startup that expanded aggressively across Asia-Pacific. In interviews he keeps returning to a single detail: it took nearly ten months to open a corporate bank account and set up a legal entity in developed markets like Australia and Japan. Ten months. In a startup, ten months is a runway. He decided that was absurd, and left to build software to fix it. Multiplier launched later that year, with co-founders Vamsi Krishna and Amritpal Singh.

The bet - and it is a specific one - is that the friction of international hiring is not really about payroll. Payroll is math. Currencies convert. Taxes get withheld. Software has been doing that since ADP was a printout. The friction is compliance: knowing that in France an employee has one set of rights, in Singapore a different set, in Brazil a third, and that if you get any of them wrong the local labor authority will notice. Multiplier's product is essentially a wrapper around 150 different sets of rules, presented to the customer as a checkout flow.

Before Hmlet, Khatri spent roughly six years at Nomura as an investment banker. He is an IIT Bombay graduate - the pipeline that reliably produces the founders of India's most-funded startups - and, before banking, worked in the IIT Bombay Placement Office as a placement manager. If you look at his career backwards, it reads as a coherent education in matching talent to jobs across borders. If you look at it forwards, it looks more like most careers, which is to say lucky.

Money, And What It Bought

Multiplier raised $13.2 million in Series A funding in 2021, led by Sequoia Capital India, and $60 million in Series B in March 2022, again led by Sequoia. Public reporting put the Series B valuation at around $400 million, which, at the time, was an interesting number, because the company was still under two years old. The total raised is now over $77 million.

The Series B closed roughly at the peak of the 2021-2022 zero-interest-rate-policy startup market, which is worth noting for two reasons. First, because a lot of companies that raised at that vintage are now valued below their last round on the secondary market, and the honest answer to "what is Multiplier worth today" is "probably not exactly $400 million." Second, because the EOR category, more than most, has held up. Remote work did not disappear when interest rates went up. Companies still hire abroad. If anything, they hire abroad more, because engineering salaries in San Francisco kept rising and engineering salaries in Warsaw or Bengaluru did not.

Khatri is, per his own occasional social posts and interviews, in the enviable position of running a company whose thesis has become more true over time. Multiplier's blog and case studies emphasize enterprise wins - a property platform in Singapore consolidating payroll across 16 countries; Amazon and Uber as customers - but the product is also self-serve. You can, in theory, sign up on Sunday night and have a person in Kenya on payroll on Monday morning. Not many enterprise HR products can say that.

Two Time Zones, One Job

Multiplier is headquartered depending on who you ask. The company was founded in Singapore, is registered with a New York address in most databases, and staffs a global workforce that reflects its product. Khatri himself, per multiple interviews, splits his time between Singapore and New York, a commute that runs 12 hours in one direction and 12 in the other, meaning there is never a time zone where he is fully awake or fully asleep. This is a common ailment among founders of globally distributed startups. He appears to find it useful for meeting customers.

The company employs around 680 people, per market intelligence data, and has offices in the US, India, and Singapore, with distributed staff across the countries it serves. The product engineering is heavily India-based, which is not surprising - the co-founders are all IIT graduates, and the technical talent pool in Bengaluru is deep. The go-to-market is heavily US-based, which is also not surprising, because that is where the buyers are.

The Category Fight

Multiplier is not alone. Deel, based in San Francisco, is the category's revenue leader and hit a reported $12 billion valuation. Remote, based in the US with a European feel, sits somewhere between. Rippling, the payroll-and-HR-suite unicorn from Parker Conrad, has been steadily building an EOR product into its stack. And a long tail of regional competitors - Papaya Global, Oyster, Velocity Global - fight over specific corridors.

Khatri's positioning is that Multiplier is more compliance-forward, more product-native, and more useful to companies that are not yet the size of Amazon. In interviews he tends to talk less about scale and more about the specific mechanics of local labor law: which countries require a 13th month of pay, which require notary-authenticated employment contracts, which have specific rules about paying contractors in local currency. This is unglamorous. It is also the moat.

The technology stack Multiplier discloses publicly is standard modern SaaS: AWS, Kubernetes, React, Salesforce for sales, Zendesk for support, dbt and Snowflake for analytics. The company has begun integrating LLM-based features into onboarding and support workflows, which is not particularly novel in 2026 but is a reasonable use of the tools.

What The Founder Talks About

Khatri is a relatively active public figure for a Series-B CEO. He does podcasts. He posts on LinkedIn. He gives interviews to trade publications about the future of payroll, the challenges of global compliance, and, increasingly, about brand and leadership. In a recent Authority Magazine interview he was asked about the future of leadership; his answer was that leaders are increasingly the brand of their companies, whether they want to be or not, and that founders who ignore this are being naive. It is a mildly self-serving observation from a founder who does a lot of podcasts, and also correct.

He was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2023, in the Enterprise Technology category. The list is what it is - a lagging indicator of who raised a lot of money recently - but the recognition is real, and it did what these lists do, which is generate a wave of inbound interest from press, customers, and other founders.

Reading Him Backwards

The interesting throughline in Khatri's career - the one you notice only if you read it backwards - is that he has spent his entire professional life in some form of matching. At IIT Bombay's Placement Office, matching engineering students to first jobs. At Nomura, matching capital to companies. At Hmlet, matching workers to housing across cities. At Multiplier, matching employers to employees across countries. It is possible this is a coincidence. It is also possible it is a pattern.

What Multiplier is really building, if you squint, is a labor exchange. The company's own tagline occasionally uses the phrase "global exchange for work." An exchange, in the finance sense, is a place where two sides of a transaction that could not otherwise find each other are brought together with sufficient trust to close. That is what an EOR does, if you strip out the payroll math and the compliance mechanics. It is a trust layer between an employer somewhere and an employee somewhere else. Khatri came to this from a banking background, which is a coincidence that is probably not a coincidence.