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Samantha Orihuela Is Building ADP's Next Growth Story Around People
After two decades moving between brand, experience, innovation and growth, Samantha Orihuela has returned to ADP with a clear brief: make a global company feel coherent, useful and human.
Eight Companies Fighting to Run Your Company
Eight companies - ADP, Paradox, Deel, HiBob, Workday, RemoFirst, UKG and Rippling - are competing to own the software layer that hires, pays, manages and offboards nearly everyone who works for a living. This is the story of the seventy-five-year-old incumbent, the enterprise giant born of a grudge, the fast-growing global-payroll rivals now locked in a corporate espionage lawsuit, and the newcomers trying to make hiring anyone, anywhere, feel like ordering takeout.
ADP (Automatic Data Processing)
ADP is one of the world's largest providers of payroll and human capital management (HCM) technology and services. Founded in 1949 as a manual payroll bureau in New Jersey, it now runs cloud-based platforms that pay and manage the workforces of more than a million clients across 140 countries, processing pay for roughly 42 million workers. Its business spans payroll, tax filing, benefits, talent, time and attendance, retirement services, and full HR outsourcing through its PEO arm.
Cascade AI
Cascade AI is a Bellevue/Seattle-based startup building an agentic AI platform for HR and IT operations. Its AI teammates sit across systems of record like Workday, ADP, UKG and ServiceNow to answer employee questions and resolve requests across benefits, leave, compensation, policy and IT - executing workflows in real time rather than just surfacing information. Founded in 2022 by former Microsoft engineers Ana-Maria Constantin and Pulak Goyal, the company raised a $3.75M seed round led by Gradient, Google's AI-focused venture fund, and says customers see roughly a 50% drop in HR ticket volume after deployment.
Thatch
Thatch is a San Francisco health benefits platform that lets employers give workers a tax-free monthly healthcare budget instead of a one-size-fits-all group plan. Employees shop a marketplace for their own medical, dental and vision coverage, then spend any leftover budget on care through a Thatch debit card. Built around ICHRA - a 2020-era IRS rule - the company aims to unbundle health insurance from a single employer plan and hand the choice back to individuals. Since launching in 2023 it has served more than 1,000 businesses and raised about $84.5 million across seed, Series A and Series B rounds.
Matt Levin
Matt Levin is the CEO of Modern Health, a leading global workplace mental health platform. A serial CEO with two decades of leadership across HR technology, health care, and benefits, Levin has helmed Benefitfocus (sold to Voya Financial), People 2.0 (a 50-country HR platform), and held C-suite roles at ADP and Aon. He was part of the core team that engineered the landmark $4.9 billion Aon-Hewitt merger and was recognized as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2013. A Chicago-based operator and longtime lecturer at both Northwestern and the University of Chicago, he now leads Modern Health's mission to bring proactive, globally equitable mental health care to the world's workforce.