employer-of-record
(25)
Deel Went Wide. Papaya Built the Rails.
The global payroll rivals started in the same lane. Now Deel is assembling an HR operating system while Papaya Global is betting that owning the payment layer matters more.
RemoteMore Failed Twice, Then Built a 50,000-Engineer Shortcut for Lean Tech Teams
Two founders named Boris burned through two startup ideas before finding the expensive bottleneck hiding behind remote work: companies did not need more resumes - they needed qualified interviews, compliant payroll and specialists who could start without months of overhead.
Deel Owns The World, TriNet Owns The Backyard
One company hires people in countries where you have no office. The other runs HR for the office you already have. Same industry, almost no overlap - and the choice comes down to where your next hire sits.
Rippling or Justworks Depends on Who Employs Your Team
The dashboards may look similar, but the contract underneath them can move payroll-tax duties, workers' compensation and employer status. Compare the product model before comparing the feature list.
Remote’s Cleanest Advantage Over Deel Is Disappearing
Remote built its pitch on owning the local entities that employ workers. Deel now says it has done the same at broader scale, turning a once-clean contrast into a country-by-country diligence exercise.
Before You Pick a Global Payroll Platform, Read the Docket
Deel, Remote and Papaya Global sell the same seductive promise: hire anywhere without inheriting a compliance maze. The products overlap, but one unresolved court fight changes what a serious buyer should ask before signing.
Pebl Wants Global Hiring to Feel Like Booking a Flight. The Hard Part Is Everything You Don't See.
Pebl sells a quick click into 185-plus labor markets. Behind it sits the decidedly unquick work of licenses, payroll rails, local benefits, immigration rules, and human judgment.
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.
Workpay
Workpay is a Nairobi-based HR and payroll software company that helps local and global businesses hire, pay, and manage employees and contractors across Africa. Its cloud platform combines payroll processing, time and attendance, leave, expenses, benefits, and Employer of Record (EOR) services so companies can run compliant payroll in local currency without setting up a legal entity in each country. Founded in 2019 out of an earlier product called TozzaPlus, the Y Combinator-backed startup serves more than 1,000 companies and processes over $200 million in payroll value a year.
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.
RemotePass
RemotePass is a global employment and payroll platform that helps companies onboard, manage, and pay distributed teams across more than 150 countries. It combines Employer of Record (EOR) services, contractor management, and compliance with an embedded fintech layer that gives workers USD accounts, global cards, and health insurance. Founded in the UAE in 2021 and dual-headquartered in Boston and Abu Dhabi, the company has facilitated over $800 million in cross-border payroll for more than 35,000 workers.
Multiplier
Multiplier is a global employment platform that lets companies hire, onboard, pay and manage full-time employees and contractors in 150+ countries without setting up local entities. Founded in 2020 in Singapore, it bundles Employer of Record (EOR), Contractor of Record, global payroll, PEO and HRIS tooling into one dashboard, handling local labor contracts, tax, benefits and compliance so distributed teams can operate legally across borders.
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.
Sagar Khatri
Sagar Khatri is the co-founder and CEO of Multiplier, a global employment platform that lets companies hire, onboard, pay, and comply with local labor law across 150+ countries. An IIT Bombay graduate and former Nomura investment banker, he started Multiplier in 2020 with Vamsi Krishna and Amritpal Singh after living through the pain of setting up international entities as a corporate development executive at Singapore-based co-living startup Hmlet. Multiplier raised a $60M Series B led by Sequoia Capital India in 2022 at a reported $400M valuation, and Khatri, a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia honoree, now splits his time between Singapore and New York.
Paismo
Paismo is a people-first, AI-powered HR and payroll platform built for small and mid-sized businesses in emerging markets. Founded in 2022 by University of Pennsylvania alumni Rebecka Zavaleta and Usama Mahmud, it combines core HR, time and attendance, leave, performance management and automated payroll into one cloud system - with localized features designed from the ground up for markets that legacy HR software has long ignored. Backed by a $1.5M seed haul led by Indus Valley Capital, Paismo now spans the US, UAE, Pakistan, Mexico and Ethiopia, and has layered on Employer of Record services and a one-click payroll partnership with easypaisa.
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.
Atlas HXM
Atlas HXM is a Chicago-based Human Experience Management platform and the original direct Employer of Record (EOR), letting companies hire, pay, and support talent in 160+ countries without setting up local entities. By owning and operating its own legal entities worldwide, Atlas handles payroll, benefits, compliance, and immigration through a single technology platform, onboarding international employees in as little as two weeks.
Jim McCoy
Jim McCoy is the CEO of Atlas HXM, the company that pioneered the direct Employer of Record model for hiring across 160-plus countries. He took the top job in December 2023 after 14 years at ManpowerGroup, where he scaled the world's largest recruitment process outsourcing business into 56 countries and managed a quarter-million placements a year. He builds for scale while obsessing over the local user experience, borrows ideas from B2C playbooks for a B2B world, and frames the work as democratizing access to economic opportunity.
Deel
Deel is a global HR and payroll platform that lets companies hire, pay, and manage workers in 150+ countries, handling contracts, compliance, taxes, benefits, and IT - all in one place.
Alex Bouaziz
Alex Bouaziz is the co-founder and CEO of Deel, the $17.3 billion global HR and payroll platform that allows companies to hire anyone, anywhere. Born in Paris in 1993 and raised between France and Israel, Bouaziz studied civil engineering at Technion and MIT before pivoting to entrepreneurship. He co-founded Deel in 2019 with MIT classmate Shuo Wang after observing glaring pay inequities for international talent and experiencing firsthand the pain of paying overseas workers. Under his leadership, Deel surpassed $1 billion ARR in Q1 2025, raised $300 million in Series E funding at a $17.3 billion valuation in October 2025, and became one of the fastest-growing HR technology companies in history.
Joyce Salas
Joyce Salas is a Founder at Deel, the San Francisco-based global HR and payroll platform that has redefined how companies hire, pay, and manage international teams. Based in Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil, she brings a finance and accounting lens to one of the fastest-growing HR tech companies in the world - a company that has raised over $1.27 billion in funding, crossed $1 billion in annual revenue, and employs more than 8,400 people serving businesses in 150+ countries.
Nurasyl Serik
Nurasyl Serik is the co-founder and CEO of RemoFirst, a San Francisco-based Employer of Record (EOR) platform that enables companies to hire and manage full-time employees and contractors across 185+ countries. Born in Kazakhstan and educated in the UK, Serik bootstrapped RemoFirst to seven figures before raising $39.4M in venture funding, earning a Forbes 30 Under 30 spot in 2024 and a Fast Company Most Innovative Companies ranking in 2025. His platform undercuts legacy EOR providers with flat-rate pricing starting at $199/month, processing payroll across multiple currencies for clients including Microsoft, Mastercard, and the WHO.
RemoFirst
RemoFirst is an Employer of Record platform that lets companies hire, pay, and manage full-time employees and contractors in 185+ countries without setting up local entities. Founded in 2021 in San Francisco, it competes with Deel and Rippling by undercutting them on price - starting at $199 per employee per month - and handling payroll, taxes, benefits, equipment, and visas on its customers' behalf.
Terminal
Terminal is a global talent platform that helps companies build and manage remote engineering teams across Canada, Latin America and Europe. It vets developers, handles employment, payroll and benefits as employer of record, and matches them with startups and enterprises hiring full-time or contract engineers.