Mercury enters payroll

Today, we’re excited to announce that Mercury has acquired Central, an AI-native payroll and benefits platform designed for startups. Founded in 2023 and backed by First Round Capital and Y Combinator, Central uses AI agents and human experts to handle payroll, benefits, PTO, HR, state compliance, and more for founders. Co-founders Josh Wymer, Pranav Kashyap, Nilay Modi, and the Central team are joining Mercury.

At Mercury, we believe your bank account should do more than hold your money. It should power everything your company does with money, from the moment it comes in to the moment it goes out. While the tools founders use to build have been completely reinvented, many parts of the financial back office still feel frozen in time. 

Payroll is one of the largest recurring expenses for companies. For Mercury customers that run payroll, it represents roughly 20% of their total spend. Most payroll tools give you a dashboard and leave you to figure it out. Central has built a better UX that works more like a teammate that handles the work for you.

When we got to know the Central team, we were excited by both the product and the model. Central had made a different bet: Instead of selling founders more software to manage, they sent people and AI agents to do the work for them. And customers were paying for it: Central already has nearly 500 startup customers and has processed more than $175M in payroll. Mercury serves 1 in 3 U.S. startups and we know our customers will love the Central product (in fact, over 250 of them already do!).

We plan to continue supporting Central as we integrate it with the rest of the Mercury product. If you’re a Mercury customer, you can sign up for Central now at centralhq.com. 

The goal of building Mercury has always been radically different banking, where everything a company does with money is deeply integrated with the account rather than connected to it from the outside. This is why we built Mercury IO, our corporate card, as well as bill pay, invoicing and reimbursements. Payroll has been a missing piece, and Central is how we close that gap. We’ll share more on how Central and Mercury connect as we build it together.

Jason, Max, and I are thrilled to work with Josh, Pranav, Nilay, and their team. Josh led product engineering at Mixpanel as it scaled past a $1 billion valuation. Pranav comes from Stripe, McKinsey, and Sequoia. Nilay is a product designer and 2X YC founder. They’ve built something genuinely hard and made it feel easy. We’re thrilled to have them join us.