Rain is a Santa Monica fintech that lets employees tap the wages they've already earned before payday. It plugs directly into employer payroll and time-and-attendance systems to calculate real-time earnings, then pairs instant access with budgeting tools, free tax filing, financial coaching, an AI financial assistant and a debit card. Since 2019 it has reached over 3.5 million workers and moved more than $2 billion in wages, positioning earned wage access as an employer benefit that cuts turnover and financial stress.
John Waldmann is the founder and CEO of Homebase, the team-management app built for the people who run local businesses - restaurants, salons, retail shops and the hourly teams behind them. Started in 2014 after watching a childhood friend drown in paper schedules and his sister juggle unpredictable bartending shifts, Homebase now serves more than 150,000 businesses and 3.8 million workers, processing hundreds of millions of shifts a year with scheduling, time clocks, payroll, messaging and earned-wage access. A Stanford GSB grad who once sold tuxedos and started his first online business at 13, Waldmann is an unapologetic believer in accountability over consensus, 'operating velocity,' and the idea that AI will create more small business owners, not fewer.
Qian Liu is a fintech operator and data scientist who helped build the robo investing movement from the inside. A computer scientist by training - PhD in machine learning from Penn, BS from Tsinghua - she was an early member of the Wealthfront founding team and its Director of Research, then Head of Data at GoFundMe, then Chief Data Officer at Guideline, the small-business 401(k) platform. When Gusto acquired Guideline, she moved into a leadership role at Gusto, where the brokerage entity sits inside its HR, payroll and benefits platform serving small and medium businesses. In 2024 she co-authored 'The Little Book of Robo Investing' with Elizabeth MacBride, turning a decade of building automated investing products into a plain-spoken guide for ordinary savers.
Belfry is a New York-based vertical SaaS company building the all-in-one operating system for physical security guard companies. Its platform unifies scheduling, timekeeping, GPS-tracked field operations, embedded payroll with tax filing, and automated billing - replacing the spreadsheets and stitched-together tools that security firms historically relied on. Founded in 2022 by Jordan Wallach and Alex Tulenko, Belfry serves hundreds of security businesses and raised a $12M Series A in January 2025 led by Base10 Partners.
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.
Warp is an AI-native payroll, compliance, and benefits platform built for high-growth startups. It automates the back-office grind - multi-state tax registrations, filings, benefits enrollment, global contractor payments, and compliance-notice resolution - so founders can hire, onboard, and pay teams anywhere in the US and 150+ countries without the manual admin. Backed by Y Combinator and Sound Ventures, Warp has raised about $24-25M to build what it calls an autonomous back office.
Ayush Sharma is the founder and CEO of Warp, an AI-native employee management, payroll, and compliance platform built for high-growth startups. An MIT computer science and physics graduate and former Yelp ML engineer, he started Warp out of Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch to fix the government red tape he hated as a distributed-team founder. Warp now runs payroll across all 50 US states and 150+ countries for hundreds of startups, and in June 2025 raised an $18M Series A led by Sound Ventures.
Nico Simko is the co-founder and CEO of Clair, a New York fintech that lets hourly workers tap their earned wages the moment a shift ends, with no interest and no mandatory fees. A former Swiss national-team fencer who captained the U17 squad before fencing at Harvard, he studied economics, worked an hourly campus job, then ran M&A due diligence on payments fintechs at J.P. Morgan. He founded Clair in 2019 after becoming obsessed with the idea that any employer should be able to pay people instantly. Clair embeds inside HR and payroll platforms and earns most of its money from debit-card interchange rather than worker fees. The company has raised hundreds of millions in equity and debt, including a $23.2M Series B in 2025 led by Upfront Ventures with Thrive Capital. Simko is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
Xero is a cloud-based accounting software company founded in Wellington, New Zealand in 2006. It serves more than 4.4 million subscribers - mostly small businesses and the accountants and bookkeepers who advise them - across New Zealand, Australia, the UK, the US and beyond. Xero connects bank feeds, invoicing, payroll, expense tracking and a marketplace of thousands of third-party apps into a single real-time platform, and reported NZ$2.1 billion in revenue in FY25.
Scott Helmes is a senior operator on the CEO team at Gusto, the San Francisco payroll, benefits and HR platform used by hundreds of thousands of small businesses. A product and marketing veteran who spent more than a decade scaling CareerBuilder across North America and Europe, he joined Gusto in 2019 and has been part of the leadership group steering its move into embedded payroll, AI-assisted workflows and SMB benefits.
Gusto is a cloud-based payroll, benefits, and HR platform built for small and medium-sized businesses. Founded in 2011 as ZenPayroll by Josh Reeves, Tomer London, and Edward Kim, the company has grown to serve over 500,000 businesses and recently crossed $1 billion in annual revenue. Gusto handles everything from payroll runs and tax filings to health insurance, 401(k) plans, and employee onboarding - replacing what used to require a patchwork of accountants, brokers, and spreadsheets with a single platform. The company also offers Gusto Embedded, a payroll API that lets other software platforms build payroll directly into their products. Valued at roughly $9.5 billion, Gusto remains private and is widely considered a leading IPO candidate in the HR tech space.
Homebase is a San Francisco-based workforce management platform built for small businesses running hourly teams. Founded in 2014, it combines employee scheduling, time tracking, payroll, HR compliance, and team communication in one mobile-first app. As of 2024, the platform serves over 150,000 businesses and 3.8 million hourly workers, having logged 8 billion hours and processed $3 billion in gross payroll. Backed by $198 million in total funding, Homebase competes by bundling tools that small business owners previously paid for separately - and more recently by embedding AI assistants across hiring, scheduling, and payroll.
Hourly is a Palo Alto-based fintech platform that combines payroll, workers' compensation insurance, and time tracking into a single mobile-first system built for small businesses with hourly workers. Its pay-as-you-go workers' comp model calculates premiums against actual wages in real time, eliminating year-end audits and helping employers avoid overpaying. Founded in 2018 by Tom Sagi, Shay Litvak, and Amir Faintuch, the company raised $39M+ and serves 500+ businesses across construction, manufacturing, transportation, and similar industries. In July 2025, Hourly was acquired by Israeli insurtech WeSure in a deal valued at approximately $168M.
Lumber is an AI-powered construction workforce management platform that unifies payroll, time tracking, HR, safety, compliance, and field productivity for contractors. Founded in 2023 by Shreesha Ramdas and Manish Kumar, the company is building autonomous AI agents for an industry where 41% of the workforce is set to retire in seven years.
Aziz Qureshi is one of the four co-founders of Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll), the cloud-based HR, payroll, and benefits platform serving over 500,000 small and medium businesses across the United States. Founded in 2012 as part of Y Combinator's Winter 2012 batch, Gusto has grown into one of the most prominent HR SaaS companies in the world, raising over $796 million in funding at a $10 billion valuation. Qureshi, based in Karachi, Pakistan, has maintained a notably private profile compared to his co-founders, contributing to Gusto's mission of bringing simplicity and humanity to workforce management for small businesses.
Joyce Salas is a Founder at Deel, the San Francisco-based global HR and payroll platform that has redefined how companies hire, pay, and manage international teams. Based in Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil, she brings a finance and accounting lens to one of the fastest-growing HR tech companies in the world - a company that has raised over $1.27 billion in funding, crossed $1 billion in annual revenue, and employs more than 8,400 people serving businesses in 150+ countries.
Max Wang is the Co-Founder and CTO of Workstream, a San Francisco-based HR and payroll platform built specifically for America's hourly workforce. He co-founded China's AngelList equivalent (VC.CN) in 2011, built it to a 50-person team, then crossed the Pacific to co-build Workstream with Desmond Lim and Lei Xu after a 100-interview discovery sprint revealed that hiring hourly workers was a massive unsolved problem. Today, Workstream serves 4,000+ businesses across 24,000 locations, has raised $118 million, and is deploying AI tools - including VoiceAI - to compress hiring cycles from weeks to hours for restaurants, franchises, and deskless-workforce employers.
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.
Rushi Patel is the Co-Founder and COO/CRO of Homebase, the all-in-one workforce management platform serving 100,000+ small businesses and 2+ million hourly workers. With a background spanning McKinsey, KKR, and Microsoft, Patel co-founded Homebase in 2014 alongside John Waldmann to give local business owners - restaurants, retailers, and service businesses - the same quality workforce tools that enterprise companies take for granted. Under his leadership, Homebase has raised $198M in funding including a $60M Series D in April 2024, and grown to 1,900 employees while generating approximately $180M in annual revenue.
Workstream is an HR, hiring and payroll platform built for the deskless economy - the 80 million Americans who clock in by the hour at restaurants, gyms, car washes and franchises. Founded in 2017 by three immigrants in San Francisco, it uses texting, voice AI and automation to cut time-to-hire by roughly 70% for chains like Burger King, Jimmy John's and Chick-fil-A franchisees.
Tom Sagi is co-founder and CEO of Hourly, a Palo Alto-based fintech and insurtech platform that integrates payroll, time tracking, and workers' compensation insurance for small businesses with hourly employees. His frustration managing payroll manually at his family's construction business inspired him to build Hourly in 2018 alongside CTO Shay Litvak and Executive Chairman Amir Faintuch. The company has raised over $39 million in funding, forged partnerships with Great American Insurance and Nationwide, and grown to serve thousands of small businesses across construction, home services, and retail.
Tomer London is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Gusto, a $9.5 billion payroll and HR platform serving 400,000+ small businesses across the United States. Born and raised in Haifa, Israel, where his father ran a clothing store for over 35 years, Tomer taught himself Visual Basic at age 12 to build inventory software for the family business — a founding instinct that never left him. After earning his B.S. from the Technion and pursuing graduate studies at Stanford, he co-founded Gusto (originally ZenPayroll) in 2011 with Josh Reeves and Eddie Kim, going through Y Combinator and building the company into one of the most beloved B2B products in Silicon Valley, known for its unusually high NPS scores and the philosophy that payroll software should feel like a celebration, not a chore.
Every is an all-in-one back-office platform for startup founders, bundling free incorporation, business banking, corporate cards, treasury, payroll, HR, benefits, bookkeeping, and taxes into a single dashboard. Founded in 2021 by Rajeev Behera and Barry Peterson and headquartered in San Francisco, the company raised a $22.5M Series A led by Redpoint Ventures in September 2024 to keep replacing the patchwork of tools that consume founders' time.
Francis Cruz Barte is the Chief Executive Officer of Exypnox Inc., a Philippines-based business process outsourcing company that partners exclusively with US-based software companies to build high-impact, cost-efficient remote teams. Operating out of San Francisco and Bonifacio Global City in Taguig, Metro Manila, Francis built Exypnox around a singular premise: that Filipino talent, properly organized and empowered, can rival any global workforce. With a background spanning BPO operations, enterprise sales, and regional management at companies like Boostlingo, he now leads a 75-person team delivering customer support, technical support, HR management, accounting, payroll, and business development services to fast-scaling US tech firms.
Fred Helou is the founder and CEO of Vagaro, a cloud-based business management platform used by over 75,000 beauty, fitness, and wellness businesses across four countries. Born in Beirut in 1969, he escaped the Lebanese Civil War at 18, arrived in the United States penniless after being pickpocketed in France, and worked his way up from a $5-an-hour pickup boy to director of software development before being laid off in the 2008 recession — the catalyst that led him to build what is now a billion-dollar company. Vagaro has processed over $15 billion in payments, booked over 600 million appointments, and achieved unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation following a 2021 reinvestment by FTV Capital.
Jeremy Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Finch, a San Francisco-based company building the unified API layer for employment systems. After studying Electrical Engineering and Economics at Duke University and engineering connected-car APIs at Smartcar, Zhang co-founded Finch in 2020 with Ansel Parikh to solve a deceptively simple problem: why does every HR and payroll software company make developers rebuild the same integrations from scratch? Finch now connects 200+ HR and payroll providers, covers 88% of U.S. employers, and has processed data for 18+ million employees. The company has raised $58.5 million in venture funding from General Catalyst, Menlo Ventures, and Y Combinator.
Rajeev Behera is the co-founder and CEO of Every (every.io), an all-in-one back-office platform for early-stage startups covering banking, payroll, bookkeeping, taxes, compliance, and incorporation. A serial entrepreneur who previously built and sold Reflektive - an HR performance management platform - to Learning Technologies Group after raising $100M+ from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, and TPG, Behera returned from a two-year post-exit break with a mission to eliminate the back-office burden that consumed 30% of his own time as a founder. Every raised a $22.5M Series A led by Redpoint Ventures in September 2024 and has grown to 150+ customers, with roughly half from the Y Combinator network.
Vanessa Kruze is the founder and CEO of Kruze Consulting, a San Francisco-based accounting and finance firm exclusively serving venture-capital-backed startups. A CPA and Deloitte Tax alum, she launched Kruze in 2012 after working as a startup controller and spotting a gap in the market for specialized, tech-forward financial services for founders. Today, the firm has served 800+ startups that have collectively raised over $15 billion in VC funding, earned seven consecutive Inc 5000 honors, and is known in Silicon Valley as the go-to accounting partner for early- and growth-stage companies.
Parker Conrad is the co-founder and CEO of Rippling, a $16.8B HR and IT platform revolutionizing enterprise software. After being forced to resign from Zenefits in 2016 amid compliance scandals, he staged one of Silicon Valley's most dramatic comebacks, building Rippling into a unicorn that surpassed his previous company's peak valuation. Worth $2.3B, Conrad pioneered the controversial 'compound startup' philosophy - building multiple products in parallel rather than focusing narrowly - and is known for his impatient drive, contrarian thinking, and obsession with detail. From studying sea snail brains as a teenager to running payroll for 5,000 employees, he embodies the resilient, ambitious founder archetype.
Desmond Lim is the co-founder and CEO of Workstream, an HR, payroll, and hiring platform built for the 70 million hourly and deskless workers in the US. Born in Singapore to a delivery driver father and part-time cleaner mother, he became the first in his family to attend university, went on to Harvard and MIT, and built a company that now serves 46 of the top 50 quick-service restaurant brands — including McDonald's, Burger King, and Dunkin' — while raising over $120M in venture funding.