We’ve raised $15.6M to bring the future of payroll to even more companies

Jonas Bøgh
3 min readMay 19, 2021

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Today, the most common way for European businesses to run payroll is by outsourcing the process to an external provider (like an accountant, tax advisor, or payroll bureau). However, although the word outsourcing indicates that this should be a pain-free process, that is usually very far from reality.

What often happens is that Finance and HR teams end up having to send several emails, spreadsheets, and PDFs back and forth to the external provider, adhere to arbitrary deadlines, set up bank transfers, and do countless manual checks. And then we haven’t even talked about trying to keep employee data in sync between HR and payroll.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. With Pento, companies can now automate the entire payroll process, including real-time calculations, tax reporting, payslip generation, and payments, letting them submit the payroll in one single click. Pento also integrates with the most popular HRIS products (e.g. BambooHR, Hibob), and your accounting/ERP, making it easy for anyone (even people with no payroll experience) to run payroll like it’s 2021.

So far, more than 700 businesses have decided to ditch payroll outsourcing and join Pento, including companies from a variety of industries like tech (Pleo, Cuvva, Primer), hospitality (Honest Burgers), and retail (Lacoste). And we’re only just getting started.

Gearing up for the next chapter

We still have a lot to do, and our vision only grows bigger and more ambitious for each new customer joining Pento. Building a great company is hard, and we know we will need help from smart people on the way. This is why we’re excited to welcome Adam Valkin (who is also joining our board) and Trevor from General Catalyst, Addie and Tali from Avid Ventures, and Emma and Tom from LocalGlobe to the team as part of our series A.

Additionally, we’re fortunate to have some incredible founders and operators joining the round as well:

Eric S Yuan (Zoom), Tom Blomfield (Monzo), Diede van Lamoen (Stripe), Timothy Thairu (Stripe), Freddy Macnamara (Cuvva), Daniel Graf (Uber, Twitter, Google), Des Traynor (Intercom), Mike Vaughan (Venmo), Kieran Flanagan (HubSpot), Eynat Guez (Papaya Global), Matt Robinson (GoCardless, Nested), Susan Sobbott (American Express), Nitesh Banta (B12), Job van der Voort (Remote.com), Tony Jamous (OysterHR), Alex Bouaziz (Deel).

Last, but definitely not least, a huge thank you to our existing investors; Point Nine, Seedcamp, Hustle Fund, Moonfire, and Christian Jantzen, who all participated in the round. A special thanks to Ricardo Sequerra and Christoph Janz, who have been absolute game-changers, and the best seed investors we could have ever hoped for.

As I said — we have a lot to do. Join us to help build the future of payroll!

In the coming months, we’ll expand to more countries, build more integrations, and launch our open API which will enable our customers, startups, and product builders to create their own custom workflows with Pento’s local payroll infrastructure.

We’re growing faster than ever, and we need help! We’re an international, diverse, and remote-first team with small hubs in Copenhagen and London, and with people based out of 11 different cities (and counting). We’re hiring across pretty much all teams, and you can find our open roles at pento.jobs and our public handbook at Pento Home.

I am excited about the progress we‘ve made over the past 12 months, and I feel very lucky to be working with a team of not only smart but amazing people every day. We would not have gotten even close to where we are today if it wasn’t for every single member of the Pento team showing up every day, living our principles, going the extra mile for our customers, and building an amazing product. The next chapter is going to be exciting, hard, and super fun, and I am convinced we are in a very unique position to build something great.

Let’s do this!

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Jonas Bøgh

Building a much better payroll experience for companies and their employees @pentohq.