global-payroll
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Niural AI spent years building what a paycheck takes for granted
Before it could ask an AI coworker to run payroll, Niural had to build the machinery that moves the money. Its wager: growing companies will pay to stop changing systems every time they change shape.
Remote sells the paperwork that lets talent stay put
A video call can cross a border in seconds. An employment contract cannot. Remote built a business in the gap - and is now reaching from payroll into the rest of working life.
PIO and the Price of One More Country
A first overseas hire can bring a whole country’s paperwork with them. PIO sells a way to handle the contracts, payroll and local obligations before expansion becomes an administrative occupation.
The Back Office Has Too Many Front Doors
Series wants a finance team to stop acting as the human bridge between banks, payroll, bills and contracts. Its answer is a menu of connected software, with the identity of each business entity at the center.
Shuo Wang Built a Revenue Machine From the Questions Everyone Else Avoided
She began by selling scooters with limited English, trained as a robotics engineer, and learned to treat rejection as useful data. At Deel, Shuo Wang turned that habit into a global sales system built for work without borders.
Mercans wants payday to be boring. In 160 countries.
A payroll specialist with its own calculation engine, Mercans is selling an escape from the monthly spreadsheet scramble. Its customer stories put a price on the problem.
The HR Bot That Knows Where Everyone Lives
Deel fed a chatbot the paperwork of global employment, then taught it to watch payroll, route time off, and remember that France has rules. For multinational HR teams, that context is the whole point.
Beatriz Gomez Is Making Payroll a Dinner Conversation
Ontop's CMO traded the mass-marketing megaphone for tables of 15, then built a data engine behind the dinner. Her playbook is a study in intimacy, local context and the useful art of listening.
Ontop Bet That Contractors Need a Bank, Not Just a Paycheck
The Bogota-born startup bundled contracts, compliance and cross-border payroll with a financial account for the person getting paid. Its sharper contractor-first strategy is a useful lesson in choosing one messy workflow and owning both ends of it.
Daivik Goel Submitted at 7:59. Then He Built What the First Three Applications Missed.
Three polished YC applications went nowhere. The rushed fourth arrived with one minute left - and began a sprint through pivots, payroll and the useful discipline of keeping things simple.
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.
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.
One Startup Bets on Goals, the Other Owns the Money
Betterworks turned Google's goal-setting religion into enterprise software. Papaya Global decided the real leverage was in owning the payroll payment itself. Here is how the two HR-tech bets actually differ.
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.
ADP
Founded to hand-process payroll for a handful of New Jersey firms, ADP now quietly moves the paychecks of one in six American workers - and it hasn't missed a quarterly earnings increase since 1961.
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.
Hubpay
Hubpay is a UAE-regulated fintech that gives small and medium businesses a global payments platform - multi-currency business accounts, competitive FX, cross-border payroll, and regulated payment links in one dashboard. Founded in 2019 by Kevin Kilty and licensed under the Abu Dhabi Global Market, it was the first independently regulated fintech in the UAE authorized to offer digital money services, and it now connects the UAE with markets across Asia, Africa, and Europe.
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.
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.
Bolto
Bolto is an AI-native, all-in-one platform that helps fast-growing companies hire, pay, and manage software talent across borders. It pairs expert local recruiters with AI screening to deliver candidate shortlists in days, then handles payroll, onboarding, and compliance in 150+ countries - replacing the patchwork of recruiters, EORs, and payroll tools companies usually stitch together.
Mern Singh
Mern Singh (Mrinal Singh) is the co-founder and CEO of Bolto, an AI-native platform that finds, vets, pays, and manages global software talent in one place. A Dartmouth graduate who left investment banking at Lazard, he built Bolto through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch after an early pivot, and has raised roughly $12.1M to date including a $12M Series A in 2026. He is an outspoken advocate for flat, lead-driven teams over traditional management.
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.