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.
The AIM-listed group is betting on the software behind clocking in. A £1 agreement to sell its physical security arm shows how much it is willing to change.
Rota began by filling last-minute hospitality shifts. The more durable business was the machinery behind the marketplace - software that lets employers, agencies and workers arrange an unruly week from the same screen.
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.
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.
ConnectPay bet that small businesses still want a human on the phone, not a support ticket - then bought dozens of local payroll shops to build a company around that promise.

palm.hr is a Riyadh-born, cloud-based HR and payroll platform built for small and mid-sized businesses across Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC. It brings employee data, time and attendance, WPS-compliant payroll, and employee engagement into one system that plugs directly into local government rails like GOSI and Mudad, so companies can run people operations that comply with regional labor law out of the box. Founded in 2019, it raised a $5M pre-Series A in 2023 to expand across MENA and pairs its software with an outsourced HR concierge service.
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.
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 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.
Workforce Optimizer is a Singapore-based B2B software company that builds an AI-enabled workforce management (WFM) platform. It uses machine learning and mathematical optimization to predict labour demand, automatically generate optimized staff schedules from millions of complex rules, track time and attendance, and dynamically redeploy people in real time when unplanned events occur. Originally founded as FriarTuck, the company serves healthcare, retail, and public-sector customers - including Singapore General Hospital and National University Hospital - and optimizes more than 20 million assignments each year for tens of thousands of daily users.
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.
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.
Legion Technologies builds an AI-native workforce management (WFM) platform for the hourly workforce. Founded in 2016 by former SAP chief product officer Sanish Mondkar, the Redwood City company automates demand forecasting, employee scheduling, time and attendance, and labor optimization for retailers, restaurants, healthcare and fitness operators. Its stated mission is to turn hourly jobs into good jobs by helping employers cut labor costs while giving frontline workers more control, flexibility, and faster access to pay.
TeamBridge is a San Francisco company building a composable, AI-native workforce management platform for the hourly and frontline workforce - roughly 70% of the world's workers. Founded in 2020 by former Uber product and design leaders Arjun Vora and Tito Goldstein, it hands operators 'LEGO block' modules for scheduling, onboarding, time and attendance, communication, instant pay and custom mobile apps, so companies can run staffing operations as one connected system. It raised a $28M Series B in September 2024 led by Mayfield, bringing total funding to about $41.5M.