After founding an international human resources firm, Fingo HR, around five years ago, Brad Price found the lack of automation existing for companies operating in multiple countries created payroll delays, and worse – errors.
So last September, he launched KarbonPay, a cloud-based payroll calculations SaaS tool. Shortly thereafter, the company launched a Wefundr campaign, which recently hit its first goal of raising more than $500,000, bringing the company’s total funding to nearly $700,000, as it looks to top out the crowdfunding raise at $1.07 million with a pre-money valuation of $6.2 million.
“If you start to make that more accessible and it becomes known over time that actually there are solutions out there that can make this kind of expansion more feasible and more appealing, that’s really globalization in a nutshell,” Price, who serves as CEO at KarbonPay, said.
By coding in the compliance rules that go along with gross-to-net payroll calculations, Price said KarbonPay’s software removes some of the friction in the process created when other international HR providers outsource to local partners in different countries. The automated software enables different countries’ languages, tax codes and versions of social security to be accounted for, allowing multinational companies to enter in the numbers.
“What I started to think was these are rules, if you can calculate the math as a person, you can calculate it on the computer, and you can automate,” Price said.
KarbonPay had already launched its services in the U.S. and South Africa, where Price is originally from before its crowdfunding campaign. That translates to about 1,600 employees across more than 100 companies serviced monthly on the platform’s subscription model.
It includes clients like Investmint, Cloudworx and Ubuntu Football, Cape Town’s football club.
With the first funding goal reached, the company is looking to continue to invest in its software and add to its nine-person team, largely on the development side. In addition, it has helped gear up KarbonPay’s launch in Mexico and The Philippines, the latter of which Price said the company has already onboarded nearly 10,000 employees ahead of the launch.
“It’s a massive opportunity for us… but we’re trying not to get ahead of ourselves and recognize that the best way of converting that into a reality is by putting one foot in front of the other now in a strategic way,” Price said. “As we get more and more customers, we will be in a position where more and more of them are saying, ‘hey we need Australia or… wherever that may be,’ and then we’re able to launch in a country and have thousands of heads on the platform from launch day.”
While Price said the pandemic created problems attracting VC dollars as a pre-money company early made work difficult, he said trends like remote work had accelerated technologies like KarbonPay’s adoption, especially as companies look to cut other costs by outsourcing labor. He added that the company has begun to see attention from firms operating in a single country, though the main focus remains on multinational firms.
To capture that trend, Price said KarbonPay is looking at “aggressive” growth. Reaching the total crowdfunding amount would allow the company to launch in an additional three countries, to reach 30 countries within the next three years. As the company has worked to bring new countries onboard, Price said the company has begun receiving attention from international investors, many of which are from Latin America. The company was also recently selected to raise money via a private crowdfunding raise on Fundable, which could net KarbonPay an additional $500,000.
“The numbers there are astonishing. If we achieved one percent of [the U.S. market] customer base, this is a hundred-million-dollar business or more, so there’s a lot of capacity and space for this,” Price said.xx
