OnPay, an Atlanta-based payroll software company, has raised more than $100 million, the company announced Tuesday.
The major infusion of cash is from two main sources: a $63 million investment round led by California-based Carrick Capital Partners, and debt financing.
The investment led by Carrick is known as a Series B, a second major venture investment designed to help OnPay scale its operations.
Jesse Burgess, CEO and founder of OnPay, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution he sees this fresh funding as an opportunity for his company to hire more employees in Atlanta, expand the software company’s services and acquire more clients.
Burgess first created the OnPay software in 2011 when he was working for his grandfather’s traditional payroll company. Back then, Burgess said it was “pretty rare” to have an online platform where an employer could login and process payroll, print paychecks or do direct deposit.
“We really hit something that the market was looking for and the product took off,” he said.
In 2015, he spun OnPay off from his grandfather’s company and has since grown it to about 200 employees with clients across many industries in the United States. The company is headquartered in Ponce City Market.
Before Tuesday’s announced investment, Burgess had only raised about $6 million and was mostly self-funded, he said. Now, the $100 million will allow him to accelerate the growth of the company.
“There’s still a lot of opportunity to innovate in our space and bring more features that would have been historically thought of as enterprise-level features to the masses,” Burgess told the AJC.
The OnPay investment comes as early signs point to a rebound in venture funding for startups. Since 2021, it has been increasingly difficult for entrepreneurs to raise capital, though 2024 seems to have been a more fruitful year, particularly for artificial intelligence startups. Last year, U.S. companies raised $178 billion in venture funding, an increase of about 29% from $138 billion in 2023, according to data firm Crunchbase.
The $63 million Series B includes $53 million in investments in August last year, and another $10 million in November. Last year also saw a few other metro Atlanta companies raise large amounts.
In February, The Zero Proof, a nonalcoholic beverage company, raised seven figures. That same month, Sema4.ai, a months-old startup that helps companies create artificial intelligence agents, announced it had raised $30.5 million. In October, construction AI software company Document Crunch closed on its second investment in less than a year, bringing its total raised in 2024 to more than $30 million.
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