ZenPayroll ZenPayroll Co-founders, from left to right: Edward Kim, Joshua Reeves, Tomer London
The investors who joined the $20 million Series A round range from celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Jared Leto, to Karen Mills, the former head of the U.S. Small Business Administration, and a laundry list of famed startup CEOs from Evernote, Eventbrite, Stripe, Constant Contact, SurveyMonkey, WordPress, Instagram.
The founders of PayPal, Yahoo, Reddit, Nest, Twitter, HubSpot, and Mint also contributed.
"When you're building a business for the next fifty years, it's all about the people," says Joshua Reeves, CEO and co-founder of ZenPayroll in a press release. "This incredible group of leaders built companies from the ground up, and they want to help us solve this problem because they've experienced it firsthand."
"We pretty much got our dream list of investors. And we're really grateful," he told us.
"It's always great to invest alongside great entrepreneurs and VCs," said Max Levchin in an email with us.
The problem ZenPayroll hopes to eliminate is the notorious headache that is payroll processing. Legacy vendors such as ADP and Paychex currently own the market despite laborious and antiquated products and offerings.
ZenPayroll hopes to streamline their complicated systems by offering simpler cloud-based system that can automate all payroll tax calculations and payments, as well as provide direct deposit to employees.
The app also allows for paperless filing of all payroll-related government documents, the ability for employees to donate a portion of their paycheck to charity, and easy to read, visually clear pay stubs.
ZenPayroll has more than quadrupled its rate of payroll processing since its first round of funding, and is currently processing over $1.5 billion in annual payroll for thousands of small businesses across the United States.
"Right now we have a very strong focus on small businesses, and sub-100 person companies," says Reeves, "We are not just taking these investors to convert them to clients, it's about getting a chance to talk to these people who have been in our shoes."
ZenPayroll plans to use this latest round of funding to complete its nationwide expansion and eventually grow to support larger companies.
Here are some of ZenPayroll's new investors:
- Trip Adler, CEO and Co-founder of Scribd
- Ed Baker, Head of Growth at Uber
- Charlie Cheever, Co-founder of Quora
- Patrick Collison, CEO and Co-founder of Stripe
- Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey
- Gail F. Goodman, CEO of Constant Contact
- Kevin Hartz, CEO and Co-founder of Eventbrite
- Ryan Holmes, CEO and Co-founder of Hootsuite
- Ashton Kutcher, Actor and investor
- Jared Leto, Actor, musician, investor
- Max Levchin, Co-founder of PayPal
- Phil Libin, CEO and Co-founder of Evernote
- Steve Loughlin, CEO and Co-founder of RelateIQ
- Tobias Lütke, CEO and Co-founder of Shopify
- Karen Mills, Former Head of the U.S. Small Business Administration
- Matt Mullenweg, CEO and Co-founder of WordPress
- Alexis Ohanian, Co-founder of Reddit
- Adam Nash, CEO of WealthFront
- Aaron Patzer, Co-founder of Mint
- Matt Rogers, CTO and Co-founder of Nest
- Justin Rosenstein, Co-founder of Asana
- Dharmesh Shah, CTO and Co-founder of HubSpot
- Clara Shih, CEO and Co-founder of Hearsay Social
- Josh Silverman, President of U.S. Consumer Services at AMEX, former CEO of Skype
- John Suh, CEO of LegalZoom
- Kevin Systrom, CEO and Co-founder of Instagram
- Evan Williams, Co-founder of Twitter
- Jerry Yang, Co-founder of Yahoo
- Marco Zappacosta, CEO and Co-founder of Thumbtack