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.
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.
Rachel Lyubovitzky is a serial entrepreneur who has founded four B2B technology companies and exited three of them, generating approximately $12 billion in combined exits with her co-founders. She is the CEO, co-founder, and Chairwoman of Setuply, an AI-powered client onboarding and lifecycle management platform, and a Partner at 2048 Ventures, a pre-seed and seed stage VC firm. With a Wharton Executive MBA and a computer science background from Brandeis University, she bridges deep technical fluency with executive leadership - having built and sold companies in HR tech, benefits automation, and search. She is also a Forbes Technology Council member, a published author, and has visited more than 60 countries.