hcm
(11)
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.
SAP
The 54-year-old German software maker quietly runs the plumbing of global business - and it is betting its next chapter on AI it calls Joule.
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.
HONO
HONO is an AI-native HR technology company that runs the full employee lifecycle - hire to retire - on a single platform spanning core HR, global payroll, talent management and workforce analytics. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Gurugram, India, HONO layers conversational AI over enterprise HR operations and in 2026 launched what it calls the world's first 'headless' HRMS, replacing navigation-heavy screens with a natural-language execution engine. It serves 300+ enterprise clients across 30+ countries, covering over a million employees.
Moka
Moka (MokaHR) is an AI-native HR SaaS company founded in 2015 in Beijing that builds recruiting and human-capital-management software for mid-market and enterprise employers. Its platform combines an applicant tracking system, talent CRM, recruitment automation, analytics, and the Moka Eva AI assistant to speed up hiring and HR operations. Moka reached unicorn status after a $100M Series C led by Tiger Global in 2021 and serves 2,000-3,000+ brands, including roughly 30% of the Fortune 500, with a growing presence in Singapore and Southeast Asia.
Workday
Workday is a Pleasanton, California cloud software company that runs the core people and money systems for large organizations. Founded in 2005 by PeopleSoft veterans Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri after Oracle's hostile takeover of PeopleSoft, Workday built a single-code-base, subscription-delivered platform for human capital management, financial management, planning, and analytics. It has grown into one of the largest enterprise SaaS vendors, serving thousands of organizations - including a large share of the Fortune 500 - and is now pushing agentic AI deep into HR and finance workflows.
ADP (Automatic Data Processing)
ADP is one of the world's largest providers of payroll and human capital management (HCM) technology and services. Founded in 1949 as a manual payroll bureau in New Jersey, it now runs cloud-based platforms that pay and manage the workforces of more than a million clients across 140 countries, processing pay for roughly 42 million workers. Its business spans payroll, tax filing, benefits, talent, time and attendance, retirement services, and full HR outsourcing through its PEO arm.
UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group)
UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group) is an American workforce management and human capital management software company formed in 2020 from the merger of Kronos Incorporated and Ultimate Software. It builds cloud HR, payroll, scheduling, time-and-attendance, and culture technology - anchored by its UKG Pro and UKG Ready suites - for more than 80,000 organizations worldwide, with a particular focus on managing frontline and hourly workforces.
Paychex
Paychex is a Rochester, New York-based provider of payroll, human resources, retirement and insurance services for small and medium-sized businesses. Founded in 1971 by Tom Golisano with $3,000, it has grown into a Fortune 500 company that pays roughly 1 in 11 U.S. private-sector workers and now embeds AI across its platforms following its 2025 acquisition of Paycor.
Atom
Atom is a San Francisco-based enterprise transformation company that helps mid-size and Fortune 500 organizations move to the cloud and modernize on platforms like Oracle, Salesforce, Workday, SAP and ServiceNow. Founded in 2020 by Zain Aziz, it pitches an asset-based 'Living Services' model with packaged accelerators (Atom CORE) that compress traditional multi-year transformations into 3-6 month rollouts.
Vikash Kothari
Vikash Kothari is the Founder and CEO of Infovity, Inc., a San Mateo-based Oracle Cloud consulting firm he built from scratch in 2008 into a 380-person, $85M-revenue enterprise serving clients across manufacturing, pharma, financial services, and more. A former Oracle engineer turned entrepreneur, he leads one of the most Oracle-obsessed consulting shops in North America - a company where nearly 70% of employees are former Oracle insiders, and where roughly 90% of new business comes from referrals. He is also a General Partner at BAT VC, a venture fund focused on fintech, healthtech, and web3 with a dual US-India investment thesis.