Payroll Infrastructure Startup Check Announces Its Public Launch With $35 Million Series B Investment From Stripe and Thrive

Check, a first-of-its-kind payroll infrastructure startup whose mission is to make paying people simple, announced its public launch with $35 million in Series B funding from Stripe and Thrive Capital.

“We built Check to enable innovation in the way people g*******, and I’m thrilled to share our public launch,” said Andrew Brown, CEO and co-founder. “With Check, developers can now build wage payments into their apps just as easily as accepting an online payment.”

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Check was founded in 2019 by the team that built Oyster, the Netflix for books, which was acquired by Google in 2015. The company has employees across the United States, with headquarters/hubs in New York, San Francisco, and Atlanta, and brings together world-class technical and payroll expertise. With the close of its $35 million Series B from Stripe and Thrive, Check has raised $44 million to date. Last year it closed an $8 million Series A led by Bedrock with participation from Thrive and Index, and in 2019 it raised a $1 million Seed round from Bedrock. The company plans to use the funds to continue to grow the team.

Significant progress has come to financial services — and payments specifically — in the past decade, driven by progress in infrastructure. By effectively creating an abstraction layer across an increasingly fragmented financial system, a new class of API-centric businesses made it possible for developers to embed payment and data tools into their products. These platforms made it easy to facilitate payments to businesses. But absent an analogous platform for payroll, developers have struggled to facilitate payments from businesses to the people who work for them. Indeed, although trillions of dollars flow through U.S. payrolls every year, the technology powering payroll hasn’t improved in decades.

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Moreover, payroll — which comprises everything from maintaining confidential employee information to calculating wages and taxes to moving large sums of money, all in compliance with Federal, state, and local laws — is particularly complex. There are more than 13,000 U.S tax jurisdictions, each with its own set of rules.

“Check has developed an elegant solution that abstracts complexity, reduces risk, and removes friction in the payroll process that every company has to navigate,” said Chris Sperandio, corporate development with Stripe. “The Check team is uniquely suited to continue innovating in this domain and make paying people simple.”

Three in four businesses use an industry-specific, vertical software platform to manage their business, a reflection of the varying needs of any small business. But for these businesses — and countless others — payroll exists only in its own standalone system. Despite being fundamental to the day-to-day work of the business, payroll is a walled garden, requiring workarounds like manual data syncs, munged spreadsheets, and more extra work every time teams run payroll.

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