freelancers
(5)
Crunch’s lesson in scale: keep the accountants close
The UK accounting company pairs software with people who can explain the numbers. Its experiment with outside accountants shows why that second half deserves as much attention as the code.
The $5 Gig Grew Up. Now It's Teaching the Robots to Ask Permission.
A marketplace born on a $5 promise now sits at the center of the AI-and-work fight - and it is trying to hand the paintbrush to the people, not the machine.
Cleva
Cleva is a USD banking platform that lets freelancers, remote workers and businesses in Africa - starting with Nigeria - open U.S. dollar accounts in their own name, receive international payments via ACH, wire, or stablecoins (USDC/USDT), and spend through a virtual dollar card. Founded in 2023 by Stripe and AWS alumni Tolu Alabi and Philip Abel, and backed by Y Combinator (W24), Cleva helps users get paid in dollars and hedge against local currency volatility.
HALA
HALA is a Riyadh-based fintech building the 'bank of the future' for small and medium enterprises across Saudi Arabia and the wider MENA region. Founded in 2018 by Esam AlNahdi and Maher Loubieh, it combines business IBAN accounts, card issuance, POS and soft-POS payment acceptance, expense management and SME financing into a single platform regulated by the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA). HALA serves more than 140,000 businesses, processes over $8 billion in annual transactions, and in September 2025 raised a $157 million Series B - one of the largest fintech Series B rounds in the Middle East - at a reported valuation near $900 million.
Found
Found is a San Francisco-based financial technology company that bundles business banking, automated bookkeeping, and tax tools into a single platform for self-employed Americans. Founded in 2019 by ex-Square executives Lauren Myrick and Connor Dunn, Found pairs an FDIC-insured business checking account (via Lead Bank) with real-time tax estimates, automatic expense categorization, invoicing, and quarterly tax payments - aimed at the 64 million Americans who work for themselves.