Managing payroll is difficult in any country, but especially so in Brazil. Constantly changing laws and highly influential trade unions make it much more difficult to get payroll right. Fernando Gadotti struggled with this problem as co-founder and CEO of DogHero, Latin America's version of Rover. After selling the company in 2020, Gadotti decided this was where he wanted to focus next when he retired in 2022.
“Every time a payroll came in, it was a pain that took hours and hours of double-checking the data, but it didn't give us the insight we needed,” Gadotti told TechCrunch. “[We were] We were mostly working in the dark, but as we continued to grow, we realized that these problems were actually more than just an inconvenience. They are actually slowing down the company's growth. We waste a lot of time in busy work. ”
Just a few months after leaving DogHero, Gadotti started working on Tako, which is based in Sao Paulo. Tako is an employee lifecycle platform that automates tasks like onboarding and payroll to save companies time and consolidate all employee information in one place. Tako also provides employees with a dashboard to view information and access interactive payslips for greater transparency.
Gadotti said traditional U.S. payroll companies like ADP have operations in Brazil, but Brazil's payment system is so unique that it makes sense to have a local solution. said. He said pay laws change frequently. Additionally, there are 10,000 unions (companies often have employees in more than one union), and these unions also update their rules several times a year, sometimes giving them more power than the actual law. It is said that he sometimes has one.
Tako uses LLM (Large-Scale Language Models) to accommodate these constant changes. LLM ingests and digests labor and union law data to help Tako developers keep their code base up to date. He said he wants to keep humans informed to ensure accuracy, but allowing LLMs to get a head start can save a lot of time.
Tako launched the product in 2023. Gadotti said the company operated in secrecy and processed tens of millions of dollars in payroll, but he declined to provide details about its customers. Gadotti said the company is currently targeting mid-sized white-collar companies with 100 to 500 employees in the professional and financial services categories.
“The strategy we've taken is we're not trying to boil the ocean,” Gadotti said. “We want to start with areas we know well before moving into industrial or more complex areas. We will start with simpler segments. As the company evolves, we will We are going to move on to complex segments.”
Tako is emerging from stealth with a massive $13.2 million seed round co-led by Ribbit Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. The founders of ONEVC and Ramp also participated in this round. In addition to doubling or tripling the size of its research and development team, Gadotti said the company plans to devote the majority of its capital to research and development.
Tako has many potential areas for future expansion, including the vast world of employee benefits. Gadotti said the company plans to expand toward building more features, such as instant payments.
In addition to competing with traditional companies like ADP, there are several HR technology startups in the country like Gupy and Caju, both of which are focused on other areas of HR and employee management. Masu. But if Tako expands into these areas, as it likely will, these companies could also become strong competitors.
The name Tako means “octopus” in Japanese, and Gadotti said that's how he thinks about the business. Tako's platform aims to be the brain of employee data, extending its tentacles into various areas of employee management.
“We want to focus on the entire employee lifecycle,” Gadotti said. “We are always listening to our customers' pain points and how they want us to help them.”