How Rise built the financial layer for $1 billion in borderless payroll

Vertical: HR

Mercury products: IO, Treasury, Quickbooks integration, Payroll

In 2019, Hugo Finkelstein and Andrew Maurer set out to build a two-sided marketplace for freelancers. It didn’t work. After raising limited capital and struggling against entrenched competitors, they did what many of the best founders do: they paused, interviewed customers, and listened. What they heard was a bigger opportunity hiding inside their own infrastructure: companies hiring globally needed a way to pay distributed teams in both fiat and crypto, compliantly, without stitching together five different tools to do it.

That insight became Rise, a hybrid payroll platform that blends local currencies, stablecoins, and cryptocurrencies through a proprietary fleet of smart contracts. Instead of retrofitting blockchain onto a legacy payroll system, Rise built the compliance layer and the payment rails as a single integrated stack. The result is a platform where funding payroll in stablecoins is as straightforward as sending a wire, and settles in seconds instead of days.

The bet to build this, instead, paid off. By the end of 2023, Rise was managing over $30 million in payroll volume across clients like Lido DAO, Bitcoin.com, and Velodrome Finance. In 2024, they closed a $6.3 million Series A led by Draper Associates. By November 2025, Rise crossed $1 billion in total payroll volume, just nine months after hitting the $500 million mark.

Most payroll platforms that claim crypto support have just bolted a wallet onto a legacy system. Rise took the opposite approach: they built on-chain first, then layered local currency compatibility on top. The core infrastructure runs on Arbitrum, with support across Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, and Avalanche. Employers can deposit on one chain; contractors can withdraw on another. The platform’s routing engine optimizes every payout for speed and cost.

At the center of the system is the RiseIDOpens in new tab, a smart contract minted for each user and organization after completing KYC that acts as the connective tissue of a modular HR and finance ecosystem. Each RiseID functions as a decentralized professional identity with built-in compliance attributes that can be reused across payroll, EOR, and third-party workflows. The compliance layer is equally deliberate. Rise is a FinCEN-registered Money Service Business, SOC 2 Type II certified, and GDPR compliant. KYC/AML checks trigger automatically when new workers register. Every transaction is logged for tax and audit reporting. HR managers pull this information in standard payroll formats; they never need to touch a blockchain explorer.

In June 2025, Rise formalized a partnership with CircleOpens in new tab, the issuer of USDC, to position the regulated, fiat-collateralized stablecoin as a central element of its hybrid payroll infrastructure. At the time, Rise had processed over $650 million in payroll. Within five months, that figure nearly doubled.

Through the partnership, settlements were reduced from days to seconds, on-chain audit trails met enterprise compliance requirements, and USDC integration became a key differentiator in Rise’s sales process, with many clients citing stablecoin payment capabilities as a primary reason for choosing Rise over competitors. Circle’s mint-and-burn infrastructure allowed Rise to enable fiat-to-USDC conversion directly inside the platform, reducing complexity for the end user. The numbers tell the story: 45% of Rise’s total payroll volume now utilizes USDC. Of all contractors who opt for crypto payouts, 50% choose USDC specifically.

“Building the first truly on-chain payroll system, we wanted a stablecoin with real infrastructure, trust, and global reach. USDC clearly stood out. Circle’s partnership has been instrumental in helping us scale from a startup to processing hundreds of millions in payroll volume,” said Hugo Finkelstein.

Rise’s Series A was led by Draper Associates and co-led by Polymorphic Capital, with participation from Digital Currency Group, JAM Fund, Ryze Labs, and Paradigm Shift Capital.

According to Tim Draper, Founder of Draper Associates, Rise is the platform that “all business payroll can run on, web2, web3, fiat, or crypto” calling it “the bridge to a crypto economy and everything in between.” For a founder-backed company with fewer than 30 employees at the time of the raise, the caliber of investors signaled that the hybrid payroll thesis had legs.

Within a year of closing the round, Rise tripled its team, pushed annualized revenue into eight figures, and expanded its physical presence across eight countries.

Rise is part of Mercury’s Partner Perks program, offering Mercury customers access to its hybrid payroll platform. The partnership reflects the natural overlap between Mercury’s startup banking infrastructure and Rise’s global payroll capabilities: companies already managing operating capital through Mercury can extend that same financial rigor to paying distributed teams across 190+ countries.

Since 2024, Rise has also run its own financial operations on Mercury. Operating capital is held in checking accounts, vendor payments route through Bill Pay, and approval workflows manage spend across its growing list of service providers and infrastructure partners. Team credit cards — with merchant locks and spending controls — manage recurring operational expenses like software subscriptions and advertising, earning 1.5% cashback on every transaction. Idle capital sits in Treasury, where Rise captures yield on cash reserves between payroll funding cycles. The full stack syncs to Rillet ERP, giving Rise’s finance team a real-time picture of operating capital, vendor spend, and cash positioning as the company scales — the same kind of financial visibility Rise’s own platform is designed to give its customers.

Rise’s roadmap for 2026 includes expanding EOR coverage to 60+ countries, deepening multi-chain settlement options, and continuing to abstract blockchain complexity so that paying a contractor in Buenos Aires in USDC feels identical to paying one in Berlin in euros.

With 75% of Gen Z workers now preferring to receive at least part of their income in stablecoins, stablecoin transaction volume hitting $8.9 trillion in the first half of 2025, and the U.S. GENIUS Act providing a legal framework for stablecoin use, Finkelstein’s ambition is supported. He doesn’t see hybrid payroll as a niche crypto product. He sees it as the default.