Announcing Check’s $75M Series C led by Stripe

We’re thrilled to announce that Check has raised a $75M Series C. The round was led by Stripe, with participation from both existing and new investors including Bedrock, Thrive, and Index.

We started Check for a simple reason: most business owners spend way too much time and energy dealing with payroll. This used to be unavoidable. Running payroll required merging data from many different systems spanning time and attendance, accounting, sales, HR, and more. But we saw a better way.

Over the past decade there has been an explosion of software platforms serving small businesses. Platforms like Homebase, ServiceTitan, and Procare have become the core system of record for the businesses they serve, uniting almost all of the tools these business owners need in one place. Except for payroll.

These platforms heard the demand from their customers for a radically simplified payroll experience, and they realized they were perfectly positioned to deliver it. But they were frustrated by the byzantine complexity of the space.  It was like trying to build for the web in 1994, or in payments in 2008: The underlying infrastructure simply didn’t exist yet.

We set out to fix that, and to make it possible for these platforms to build incredible payroll businesses.

Over the past year we’ve made huge strides towards accomplishing that vision. Our customers now touch almost every corner of the economy, collectively powering more than 250K businesses and 4M employees across all 50 states. From vertical software to staffing, and workforce management to financial services, we continue to uncover new use cases every week.

Through that growth we’ve remained laser focused on making Check the most robust payroll platform for developers to build on. We launched Components, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for every piece of UI, and Console, so that scaling your payroll business is as easy as launching it. We announced integrations with Quickbooks and Plaid to ensure all of your financial services can stay in sync. And with comprehensive webhook support and the ability to store arbitrary metadata, we made it simple to build whatever unique experience your customers want. Not to mention the iceberg of nuts-and-bolts features that handle the deep complexity of payroll so that you don’t have to think about it.

And we’re still just getting started.

Raising this capital now sets us on a trajectory to build the enduring, independent infrastructure layer the payroll industry has long deserved, but never had. And it enables our customers to build on us knowing we’ll be here to support them for the long term.

Going forward we’ll continue to focus on making it possible for platforms to simplify payroll for their customers, and to build incredible businesses for themselves in the process.

Sound exciting? We’re hiring across many open roles. Over the past year our team has grown from 20 to more than 100 members, all connected to our company values and mission of making paying people simple. Come join us!

If this has sparked your imagination about what you can build on Check, get in touch. We’d love to talk with you about how Check can accelerate your business.

- Andrew, Vivek, and Eric