human-capital-management
(29)
Netchex and the art of the 15-minute payroll
At a Wyoming YMCA, a two-hour payroll run became a 15-minute job. Netchex’s wager is that connected software and a familiar human can make payday less of a production.
ProLiant and the art of an uneventful payday
A truck driver’s time card reveals the real test of payroll software. ProLiant’s answer pairs cloud tools with a person who knows what to do when the numbers get awkward.
PM AM and the expensive art of crying wolf
A false alarm looks like a policing problem. PM AM found a business in the paperwork behind it - then carried the same appetite for overlooked operations into compliance, retail cameras and software testing.
The Company That Put Contractors on the Org Chart
VNDLY found a lucrative blind spot in the modern corporation: the people doing the work but missing from its people system. Workday paid about $510 million to bring them into view.
Ciphr wants to give HR its working day back
A holiday calculation that swallowed months became an afternoon’s work. Behind Ciphr’s pitch to Britain’s mid-sized employers is a practical bet: connect the records, then give people fewer things to chase.
Frontier Software and the art of getting payday right
For more than four decades, Frontier Software has worked on the unglamorous machinery behind payday. Its story runs from a kitchen-bench design to multinational payroll, with hard lessons about the price of trust.
The 43-Year-Old Staffing Software Firm That Became a Takeover Puzzle
Bond spent four decades turning the messy work of staffing into software. Then a public-market standoff, a £24.1 million sale and two mergers folded its hard-won expertise into Bullhorn.
The HR Software Company That Won a Customer Back From Oracle
Pilat spent decades making HR software bend to the customer. One enterprise tried the opposite, saw the compromises coming, and brought Pilat back.
PlanSource Wants to Make Benefits Admin Boring - and That’s the Point
HR teams do not need another dazzling demo. They need the newborn to be covered, the carrier file to match and open enrollment to end without a fire drill. PlanSource has spent nearly two decades turning that unglamorous promise into enterprise software.
UKG Wants to Run the Workday - From the First Shift to the Final Paycheck
A $22 billion merger joined the time clock to the employee record. Now UKG is betting that its decades of workforce data - and a layer of carefully governed AI - can turn the machinery of HR into an operating system for work.
BambooHR Put the Employee Record in Charge - Now It Wants AI to Run the Errands
The Utah software company turned a tidy employee database into a broad people platform used by more than 33,000 organizations. Its next trick is asking AI to do the administrative chasing - without losing the simplicity that made the product useful.
Cornerstone Lost Its First Business - Then Built the Software That Trains 140 Million People
The dot-com crash killed its consumer pitch. Customers designed the replacement, a loan shark covered payroll, and 25 years later Cornerstone is trying to teach HR what comes after the job description.
Namely Raised $217 Million to Fix HR Software - Then Found Its Second Act Inside a Payroll Empire
Namely set out to make the employee database feel less like a filing cabinet and more like a product people would actually use. A founder crisis, $217 million in funding and a 2022 merger turned that clean software idea into something messier - and potentially more durable.
Asure Sold Half Its Story for $120 Million - Then Built a Payroll Machine for the Businesses Everyone Else Finds Too Small
The Austin software veteran escaped a muddled identity by selling its workspace business and betting on the least forgiving job in a company: paying people correctly. Now it is stitching software, service, tax compliance and AI into one back office for growing businesses.
Viventium Bet the Future of Healthcare HR on the Weirdest Paycheck in the Building
Generic HR software assumes work is tidy. Viventium built around the opposite - then bought its way from first application to final paycheck.
Payworks Bet That Payroll Needed a Human Voice - 50,000 Canadian Businesses Picked Up
Barb Gamey carried a desktop computer into sales meetings and pitched a radical idea for payroll: modern Canadian software, backed by a person who knows your name. Twenty-five years later, Payworks is testing how far that service-first playbook can scale.
The Oracle Whisperers Who Named Themselves After a Bike Race
A Boston consultancy borrowed its name from cycling - the pack that shares the wind so no one rider burns out. Sixteen years later it is one of Oracle's go-to partners for the unglamorous, high-stakes work of moving a company's books to the cloud.
Workhuman
Workhuman turned two decades of thank-you notes into a data business. The Irish-American company behind the 'thank you economy' now reaches 8 million workers and mines their gratitude for what HR software usually misses.
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.
Insperity
Insperity built a $6.8 billion business by taking on the work small companies cannot afford to get wrong. Now its service-heavy PEO model is being rebuilt for a Workday world.
Jisr | جسر
Jisr (جسر, Arabic for 'bridge') is a Riyadh-based HR and finance software company building a cloud platform that unifies HR, payroll, talent and spend for businesses in Saudi Arabia and the wider MENA region. Founded in 2016-2017 as Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 got underway, Jisr localizes its product deeply - integrating directly with government portals like GOSI, Mudad and Muqeem so companies can run compliant payroll and workforce operations. In October 2023 it raised a $30 million Series A led by Merak Capital, reported as the largest Series A for a SaaS company in the Middle East. The platform is used by thousands of organizations processing billions of riyals in payroll.
LIFELENZ
LIFELENZ is an AI-driven workforce management platform for large hourly and shift-based employers, best known in quick-service restaurants. It uses self-tuning machine learning to forecast demand store-by-store, then builds optimized, compliant schedules and handles time & attendance, people management and reporting. Founded in 2017 with technical roots in Australia, it now serves major QSR brands including thousands of McDonald's restaurants across the US, UK and Ireland.
Harri
Harri is a cloud-based human capital management and workforce management platform built specifically for the hospitality and frontline service industries. Founded in 2012 by hospitality operators, it unifies talent acquisition, onboarding, scheduling, time and attendance, compliance, and employee engagement into a single mobile-first system. Harri serves enterprise restaurants, hotels, and retailers - powering the operational backbone for tens of thousands of locations and millions of frontline workers, helping high-turnover, multi-location businesses hire faster, control labor costs, and keep teams engaged.
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.
Infor
Infor is a multinational enterprise software company that builds industry-specific cloud applications - ERP, supply chain, human capital management, and financials - for more than 60,000 organizations across manufacturing, healthcare, distribution, hospitality, and the public sector. Headquartered in Atlanta and owned by Koch Industries since 2020, Infor differentiates itself with 'micro-vertical' CloudSuites purpose-built for narrow industry niches and delivered on Amazon Web Services.
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.
Clair
Clair is a New York-based embedded fintech that lets employees access wages they have already earned before payday, at no cost to their employer. Built directly into payroll and workforce-management platforms like Gusto and TriNet, Clair offers no-interest, non-recourse wage advances backed by partner bank Pathward, N.A. The company positions itself as a compliance-first alternative to payday lenders, aiming to break the traditional two-week pay cycle for America's frontline workforce.