global-payroll
(7)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.