Four people in San Francisco built their own money-movement stack so a founder can hire a developer in Manila before lunch - and pay them the same day, without ever touching crypto.
There is a number that Daivik Goel likes to say out loud because it sounds made up. To run payroll for one employee earning $20,000 a year, a legacy provider can charge roughly $7,000 a year. That is a third of the salary going to the machinery that moves the salary. For a large company, it is a rounding error. For a five-person startup trying to hire its first engineer in India, it is a wall.
Shor, a San Francisco company in Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch, was built to knock that wall down. It runs international payroll and Employer-of-Record (EOR) services for founders: draft a compliant contract in almost any country, collect the right tax forms, and send the first payment the same day. The pitch is simple enough to fit on a business card - "International payroll, built for founders" - but the interesting part is what happens underneath, where the money actually moves.
If you have only ever been paid by direct deposit into a domestic bank, cross-border payroll can look like a solved problem. It is not. Sending money into and out of a dozen countries means threading a chain of correspondent banks, each taking a cut and adding a day. It means local compliance rules that change by jurisdiction, tax forms with names like W-8BEN, and currencies that settle on banking hours - which is to say, not on weekends and not on holidays.
The incumbents - Deel, Rippling, Remote - solved this well enough for companies with real finance teams. But their pricing is built for that customer. A flat enterprise rate that, as Shor puts it, quietly subsidizes their European accounts. The long tail of small startups gets the same sticker price as a firm ten times their size, which is how you end up paying $7,000 to move $20,000.
Shor's answer is to own the part everyone else rents. Most payroll companies outsource the actual money movement to a third-party fintech and pass the fees through to you. Shor built its own fintech stack, and settles international payments on stablecoin rails in the backend - transfers that clear in seconds, around the clock, including the weekends that banks take off.
The important design decision is that the customer never sees any of this. You fund once from a US business account by wire or ACH. Your contractor in Lagos or Sao Paulo gets paid in their local currency. Nobody opens a crypto wallet, nobody learns what USDC is. The stablecoin is plumbing, and good plumbing is invisible.
Goel argues the ownership is the whole moat. "Because we have control on both the fintech and the payroll side, we can offer more integrated services within the platform," he has said. When you are not paying a middleman to talk to another middleman, the fees that competitors pass along quietly become your margin. That is what lets Shor price the way it does.
Shor charges $19 a month per contractor and $299 a month per full-time EOR employee. Deel and Remote list closer to $599 for the same EOR seat. The difference is region-based pricing: you pay the real cost of operating in a given country instead of a blended rate set by the most expensive markets. On top of that sits a flat 2% FX margin, disclosed on every receipt, with no setup fees, no minimums, and month-to-month cancellation.
That quote is about currency devaluation, and it explains why Shor thinks the stablecoin angle is more than a cost trick. In Nigeria and across Latin America, Goel points out, people already transact in dollar-pegged stablecoins daily, because their own currency loses value while they sleep. In the US the problem is invisible; elsewhere it is Tuesday. A payroll company that settles in stable value and pays out fast is, for those workers, also a door to the financial system they actually want.
Shor's software covers the boring, necessary surface area: locally-compliant contract templates with country-specific clauses, e-signature, tax-form collection, auto-funding, and autopilot payroll runs across 100+ currencies. The more distinctive bet is that payroll should not be a dashboard you visit. The company embeds AI agents into Slack and WhatsApp so a founder can request a contractor's tax document or a payment status update inside the tools they already have open, without logging into anything.
There is a human version of the same idea. Instead of a support ticket queue, a Shor founder sits in your Slack channel. When something breaks with a payment - and in cross-border money movement, something eventually breaks - you talk to the person who can fix it, not a first-tier agent reading a script. It is the kind of support that is impossible to scale forever, which is exactly why it works as an early advantage. A $12 billion incumbent cannot put a founder in ten thousand Slack channels.
Shor was founded in 2025 by Daivik Goel and Avi Konduru. Goel, the CEO, studied computer engineering at the University of Waterloo and worked on product and engineering at Tesla and Cisco Meraki before startups. On the side he runs Founders Brew, a community that has pulled together more than 2,000 founders across San Francisco, Toronto and New York. Konduru came from machine-learning work at Kensho and a quant seat at Wells Fargo, with a computer science degree from UT Austin.
The origin story has the shape founders love to retell. The pair started with a crypto payments idea, then pivoted to global payroll - a problem they had already tackled two years earlier and knew cold. They submitted their YC application at 7:59 PM, one minute before the deadline, after several prior rejections. Inside the batch they leaned into the payroll thesis, and shipped live contractor payroll within a week. Speed like that is less about heroics than about reps: they had built this category before, so they were fast at the parts everyone else re-learns from scratch.
Where Shor fits is the oldest pattern in startups: the incumbent's price umbrella is the newcomer's business plan. Global payroll is a large, growing, well-funded category, and the leaders have every reason to keep chasing enterprise logos. That leaves the bottom of the market - the seed-stage company hiring its first three people abroad - underserved by design. Shor is aiming its price, its transparency, and its founder-in-the-Slack support at precisely those customers.
The risks are real and worth naming plainly. Regulation around stablecoins and cross-border money transmission is still moving. Compliance in dozens of jurisdictions is genuinely hard and does not forgive shortcuts. And the incumbents can drop prices if a small challenger becomes annoying. Shor's counter is that owning the stack gives it room to move that a reseller does not have, and that the customers it wants were never going to be profitable for a company built around enterprise sales.
Backed by Polychain Capital, Goodwater Capital and Founders Capital, Shor is early - four to six people, a fresh batch, a launch, and a lot to prove. Whether it becomes the payroll layer for the next ten thousand startups or a well-built niche tool, the wager underneath is clear enough: the way most of the world gets paid across borders is more expensive than it needs to be, and someone who owns the whole pipe can charge less. That is a bet you can measure, one payout at a time.