Rajeev Behera's new all-in-one HR startup, Every, is either brilliant or crazy.
This is surprising, as the market for multi-module HR software covering payroll, onboarding and expense management for small businesses is already saturated. Competitors include unicorn startups Gusto, Rippling and Deel, established companies like Mercury and Brex that are strong in one area and expanding into others, and a host of smaller startups like Finally, Paylocity and AccountsIQ.
Every's investors clearly think Behera's unique approach to his idea is great: Every has raised $22.5 million in Series A funding led by Alex Bard of Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Okta Ventures, and Rexhi Dollaku of Base10 Partners, TechCrunch reported exclusively.
Behera's unique and perhaps brilliant strategy revolves around his target customers and what he offers to attract them.
He and co-founder Barry Peterson target Every at early-stage tech startups, helping them fill out their formation paperwork for free, then setting up a business bank account and other back-office essentials. Every makes money by charging monthly SaaS fees for other modules like accounting, as well as interchange fees.
“We've spent a lot of time building out some pretty sophisticated expense management, banking, payroll, etc. systems. Now we're releasing an incorporation system for founders that we're offering for free,” Behera said.
After an in-depth 30-minute onboarding session, startups get an integrated suite of banking, payroll, HR onboarding, HR benefits, bookkeeping, taxes, state compliance, and more. (As we recently reported , state compliance can be particularly tricky for startups.) Every customers are also given a Slack channel where they can interact with other founders.
He said that once customers incorporate, they “don't even look” at competitors like Rippling because they can easily add other modules because they already have a bank account with Every. “That's our strategy,” he said.
The company is currently targeting startups with fewer than 200 employees, rather than the more cash-rich growth-stage customers that are dominated by larger competitors. The software is intended to help companies in their first five years.
Another oddity is that Behera imagines that EVERY's fastest-growing customers will “graduate” from it, at least until EVERY itself becomes a maturity-stage fintech with software that can serve larger customers.
Connection with Y Combinator
But perhaps his real secret lies in his connection to Y Combinator.
Every was in the summer class of 2023. Behera, 42, didn’t have to learn the ropes of startups at YC: He’s best known for co-founding the human resources employee review company Reflektive, which he sold to Learning Technologies Group in 2021 for an undisclosed amount after raising more than $100 million in venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, TPG and others.
He is also married to Surbhi Sarna, who founded nVision Medical in 2018 and sold it to Boston Scientific for $275 million. She is now an advisor to YC. Evri has expanded its client base by being close to Silicon Valley's top startup factories. About half of the company's 150 or so clients come from the YC network, Behera said.
Rippling, Brex, Gusto, and Deel are also YC alumni and have access to the same YC network, so it's not surprising Every will be competing with these larger companies.
Behera took a two-year break after selling his previous company. “I had been running the company for eight years and I was pretty burned out,” he said.
But in another sign of possible insanity, he's doing another HR startup the hard way: Instead of partnering with another fintech for modules, he and Peterson (his former head of engineering at Reflektive) coded their HR payroll and banking products entirely from scratch.
Until two months ago, he was doing all the sales, onboarding of the first 50 customers, customer support, product specs and design himself.
Then help came from Bird, Redpoint's seed investor, who called and asked him to lead the Series A (what's called a “pre-emptive” deal in the venture capital world). Other venture capitalists followed suit, having heard from portfolio companies already using Every, Base10's Dollaku said.
“Rajeev told us what he was building and we funded him with a Series A,” Dollaku says. “A lot of founders were using Every, and that's how a lot of investors first heard about Every. He wasn't raising money, so he didn't need to.”
Behera said the Series A deal closed in about two weeks. He didn't disclose the company's valuation but said it was a standard 20% round, which by our calculations puts the valuation at about $112.5 million. He currently has about 20 employees and plans to use the funding primarily to hire and grow his engineering team, as well as cover the costs of his free incorporation and onboarding business model.