Less than a year after its formal launch, KarbonPay has made its first acquisition.
The local cloud-based payroll automation SaaS provider has scooped up Delaware’s XmartClock, a platform for employees to remotely clock in and out. XmartClock will help KarbonPay expand its capabilities and geographical reach, according to KarbonPay CEO and founder Brad Price. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“You’ve still got employers around the world using… paper sheets, and then it gets faxed to the payroll group,” Price said. “There’s a need for a more technological way of doing this, more accuracy and more accountability.”
XmartClock was founded in 2018. The company’s time and attendance system allows employers to set up shifts for workers, with the ability to track where workers clock in from. It also uses facial recognition technology to ensure workers are not clocking in their colleagues. Price said XmartClock has been operating largely with a hands-off approach from a single founder. Despite the company lacking a sales and marketing infrastructure, Price said it has still been gaining 200 to 300 new trial signups per month. It has clients in 20 countries, with a heavy focus on Latin America.
“We are focused on a strategic rollout throughout Latin America, so there is some compelling cross-pollination between the two systems,” Price said.
For the time being, KarbonPay is planning to keep XmartClock as a separate brand under its umbrella. In addition to building out sales and marketing for the brand, KarbonPay also plans to integrate XmartClock’s technology with its own software, making it possible to automatically calculate pay and overtime compensation, as well as provide support for XmartClock users.
“It’s a pretty good system. It’s fully functional as a standalone product, but we are going to be integrating it into KarbonPay,” Price said. “When an employer approves the hours that have been punched in by their employees, they can send those hours straight to their payslip, instead of having to do a manual data entry.”
KarbonPay just made a new hire to assist with the XmartClock initiatives in Mexico, where it recently expanded, bringing its headcount to 12.
Price said the company had been receiving attention from clients and investors in Latin America, where KarbonPay will again be expanding to another country in conjunction with a launch in the Philippines in the coming weeks.
Prior to the launch in Mexico, KarbonPay already had operations in the U.S. and South Africa. In all, the company serves more than 1,600 employees across more than 100 companies monthly on its platform, which enables different countries’ languages, tax codes and versions of social security to be accounted for during payroll processing.
So far, KarbonPay has raised nearly $750,000, most recently with a Wefundr campaign that has brought in about $540,000. At a $6.2 million pre-money valuation, Price said KarbonPay is gearing up for a Series A venture raise and is planning to launch an additional Wefundr campaign for XmartClock. Figures for those raises have yet to be determined.
“What we’re trying to do is balance what we would… overall raise with what we need, without overdoing it,” Price said. “We prefer to solve problems with smart ideas rather than excess cash.”
