Payroll infrastructure startup Check publicly launched on Wednesday, and the company raised $35 million in Series B funding from Stripe and Thrive Capital.
Check plans to use the latest financing to continue expanding its team. The latest round brings Check’s total funding $44 million to date.
Andrew Brown, CEO and co-founder of Check, told FinLedger in an interview that the company plans to use the funding to grow existing and new partnerships and hire about a dozen people across different departments, such as engineering, sales, marketing and others.
Check lets clients embed payroll directly into a vertical software-as-a-service, HR, or time-tracking platform. The company provides the “building blocks” to build a customizable payroll product, such as an API, a dashboard and other features. Brown explained that the payroll product industry is a very fragmented market, and each business deserves a whole operating system that has specifically tailored software for it.
“So, other entrepreneurs have been working on the broader operating system component of it, and Check enables those platforms to build payroll directly into those products so that the small business owners can run payroll in matter of just a few minutes rather than having to spend hours moving data between their new operating system and their old legacy payroll provider.” he said.
Although the company said in a press release that it launched on Wednesday, Check also said it was founded in 2019 by the team that built Oyster, “the Netflix for books,” which was acquired by Google in 2015. Brown said that Check spent the past two years building the core underlying platform and working with early partners, and then officially launched on Wednesday.
Check is based in New York but has hubs in San Francisco and Atlanta as well. Brown explained that the company has a distributed network of employees across the country.
Going forward, Brown said the company is focusing on executing its core mission of making payroll products easier to build.
“[We’re focusing on] working with our existing customers to scale, working with new partners, expanding into all 50 states, and making it easier to build on top of us.” he said.
This article was recently updated to reflect new information.