contractor-payments
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Zeal Found the Payroll Problem Hiding Inside the Shift
The founders went looking for a way to pay a fast-moving W-2 workforce and found a hole in the software stack. Now Zeal sells the plumbing to the platforms with the same problem.
The Spreadsheet That Could Not Screen 400 People
FloSports once screened 400 contractors in a weekend from Google Sheets. Worksuite's bet is that the real advantage is knowing whom you can call back - and having the paperwork and payment ready when you do.
Sonovate Found Its Fortune in the 90-Day Gap Between Work and Payment
Recruiters pay people this Friday and may not collect from clients until next quarter. Sonovate turned that awkward interval into a specialist lender, a software platform and, most recently, a testing ground for digital workers.
Openforce Built the Back Office for the 1099 Economy - Now It Has to Make the Mess Feel Invisible
The Scottsdale company moves $5 billion a year through the unglamorous machinery behind independent work. Its bet: the winner in contractor software is the one that turns paperwork, insurance and payments into one clean trail of proof.
Shor
Shor is a San Francisco fintech (YC S25) that runs international payroll and Employer-of-Record services for startup founders. It pays contractors and full-time employees across 150+ countries by settling on stablecoin rails in the backend while customers transact in ordinary currencies - cutting the intermediary fees that make legacy providers like Deel and Rippling expensive. Setup happens on a single call, payroll runs within a week, and pricing starts at $19/month per contractor and $299/month per EOR employee.
Wallbit
Wallbit is a US-dollar neobank built for global remote workers and freelancers who earn in dollars but live outside the US. Through a single app, users open a US checking account, get an international Visa debit card, invest in US stocks, ETFs and Treasury bonds from as little as $1, and cash out to local currency in about five minutes. Founded in 2022 by four Argentine engineers and backed by Y Combinator (W23), it serves professionals across 20+ countries in Latin America and Europe.
Hugo Finkelstein
Hugo Finkelstein is the co-founder and CEO of Rise, a global payroll and compliance company that lets businesses pay contractors and employees across 190+ countries in local currency, stablecoins, or crypto. What started at Babson College as a campus buy-and-sell app turned into a career in crypto community-building and, eventually, a payroll platform that has processed more than $1 billion in payments. Rise raised a $6.3M Series A in November 2024 led by Draper Associates and Polymorphic Capital, and Finkelstein has become one of the clearest voices arguing that the real stablecoin use case is not trading, it is payroll.
Plane
Plane (formerly Pilot) is a San Francisco-based global payroll, HR, and compliance platform that lets fast-growing companies pay U.S. employees, international employees, and contractors from a single system. Founded in 2017 out of Y Combinator's Winter 2017 batch, Plane runs domestic payroll, hires people abroad through employer-of-record services, and pays contractors in 240+ countries and 130+ currencies - pitching itself as the easiest-to-set-up multi-country payroll tool, with an unusual approach of charging foreign-exchange fees at cost rather than marking them up.
Matt Pelc
Matt Pelc is the co-founder and CEO of Plane, the all-in-one people platform (formerly Pilot) that helps fast-growing startups pay and manage employees and contractors in 100+ countries. A Cambridge-trained computer scientist who got his start writing Ruby and building Slack bots, he went through Y Combinator's Winter 2017 batch and has spent the better part of a decade trying to make a worker's location irrelevant to whether a company will hire them.
Wingspan
Wingspan is a New York-based payroll and management platform built specifically for the 1099 contractor workforce. It automates the full contractor lifecycle - onboarding, W-9 verification, background checks, same-day payments, tax withholding, and automated 1099 filing - and now ships that stack as an embeddable, white-label API (Wingspan Embed) for HR, HCM, and PEO platforms. The company has processed more than $3 billion in contractor payments and counts Teladoc Health and CRU Group among its customers.