Sony Pixel Power calrec Sony

Talent Decentralization Why IVP Invested in Papaya Global

08/03/2021

By Cack Wilhelm and Jake Storm

The push to remote work and distributed teams has been underway for years, as companies and hiring managers realize that one can find excellent talent not just in Silicon Valley. Companies like Kellogg or Hanes employ 56% and 88%, respectively, of their workforce overseas and they aren't an aberration.1

We have watched Covid accelerate this trend, with individuals dispersing to smaller cities and towns and closer to family, be it in the US or elsewhere. Based on analysis by early-stage venture firm Initialized Capital, we should expect this to persist. Post-pandemic the Initialized survey would suggest that Silicon Valley has fallen in founders' eyes to #2 behind distributed or remote for the most desirable company headquarters.2

The trouble has often come in the complexity of actually hiring that talent and formally employing a person. This has been a blocker for some. B2B companies are often accustomed to setting up regional offices, especially for sales account executives and corresponding pre-sales engineers. And many companies have one-off situations for a key developer who moved back to his or her home country, but many fast-growing mid-market companies are still figuring out how to scale a dispersed, multinational workforce.

We believe this trend toward larger, more dispersed, multinational companies has been accelerated by COVID-19 and is here to stay. CEOs and management teams are often acutely aware of tech debt and the trouble it causes but less aware of the operational debt from doing manual, complicated workflows by hand, but we have come to appreciate that employing a multinational team is just that.

This is why we invested in Papaya Global, because we believe that providing a SaaS platform through which a company can aggregate, manage, and pay all of their international workers is highly valuable to companies. Papaya has innovated in three key ways:

Product: Papaya takes away the complexity of personnel type (contractors vs. direct payroll vs. employer of record), provides a singular view, and synthesizes into actionable reports and analytics. Papaya can start to answer is it cheaper to hire an engineer in Ireland or Argentina?

Automation: Papaya automates the communication with each of these payroll service providers and removes manual toil on the part of payroll and finance teams.

Pricing: The industry has always charged a % of payroll and Papaya has changed that: Papaya charges a flat rate per employee / per month and takes no increasing tax for a higher-paid employee.

Applying a SaaS platform here to centralize and orchestrate is not a new concept, with companies in the IVP portfolio like Steelbrick (sold to Salesforce) having done the same, in their case to streamline and centralize the configure, price, quote process in sales.

Country-by-country payroll has always been services- and headcount-centric, and prior to Papaya had not been solved elegantly with software. At a glance, Papaya's centralized SaaS platform and dashboard abstract the true level of detail going on under the hood; international payroll is highly detailed and nuanced and requires extensive domain knowledge.

With that in mind, the Papaya team was the clincher for us. We did not find a question that the CEO, Eynat Guez, could not answer. Eynat previously founded and grew a company focused on global mobility and relocation, and another focused on payroll outsourcing in Asia; Eynat knows the market in which she's operating and the buyer persona to whom she is selling.

We are excited to work alongside Eynat, Ruben, Ofer, and the entire Papaya team to cement their position in global workforce management and see the Papaya product in the hands of many more teams.

Cack Wilhelm and Jake Storm are Investors at IVP, a later-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA.
LINK: https://www.ivp.com/news/blog/talent-decentralization-why-ivp-invested...
See more stories from ivp

Most recent headlines

05/01/2027

Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be demoed at CES 2026

Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...

07/10/2026

Dalet Flex LTS Delivers Smarter Media Operations from Ingest to Distribution

Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, today announced the latest Long-Term Supported (LTS) release of Dalet Flex. Build...

06/09/2026

Dolby and MagentaTV Bring Fans Closer to the FIFA World Cup 2026 in Germany with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos

June 9 2026, 23:00 (PDT) Dolby and MagentaTV Bring Fans Closer to the FIFA Worl...

06/08/2026

Hisense Adds Dolby Vision 2 to Select Models

Share Copy link Facebook X Linkedin Bluesky Email...

06/08/2026

MediaKind to showcase one unified portfolio at IBC2026

At IBC2026, MediaKind will make its first major appearance as a unified global powerhouse in video, showcasing one of the world's most comprehensive video i...

06/08/2026

Big Blue Marble to unveil AI-assisted piracy detection an...

Big Blue Marble (#5.A63) will demonstrate how its integrated technology and operational expertise help media companies scale premium services with less complexi...

06/08/2026

NIH expected to award Scripps Research nearly $4.2 million over 5 years to advance tools for vaccine design

LA JOLLA, CA-Scripps Research has received more than $500,000 in first-year fund...

06/08/2026

Improving vaccine design for Ebola, HIV and more

LA JOLLA, CA-Viruses are masters at invading our cells thanks to specialized proteins that coat their surfaces. When scientists design vaccines, they often crea...

06/08/2026

How a chemical reaction triggers brain inflammation in Alzheimer's disease

LA JOLLA, CA-The brain has its own immune system, which detects threats and mounts a defense. A growing body of evidence has shown that in Alzheimer's disea...

06/08/2026

Jin-Quan Yu elected to the National Academy of Sciences

LA JOLLA, CA-Scripps Research chemist Jin-Quan Yu has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), one of the highest honors a scientist can achieve....

06/08/2026

Scripps Research ranks third in 2026 Cure Innovation Index

LA JOLLA, CA-Scripps Research ranked third in the inaugural 2026 Cure Innovation Index recognizing the top-performing institutes and centers across the United S...

06/08/2026

Scripps Research chemist Benjamin Cravatt elected to American Philosophical Society

Benjamin Cravatt, the Gilula Chair of Chemical Biology and a professor of chemis...

06/08/2026

Scripps Research immunologist Dennis Burton elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

LA JOLLA, CA-Dennis Burton, professor and the James & Jessie Minor Chair in Immu...

06/08/2026

How changes to proteins can alter drug interactions for new precision therapies

LA JOLLA, CA-Inside every human cell, proteins are constantly being tagged with small chemical modifications after they're produced. Known as post-translati...

06/08/2026

Scripps Research establishes endowed chair honoring renowned structural biologist Ian Wilson

LA JOLLA-Scripps Research has established the Ian Wilson Endowed Chair, a new fa...

06/08/2026

Scripps Research's Skaggs Graduate School awards doctoral degrees to 34th graduating class

Scripps Research's Skaggs Graduate School of Chemical and Biological Science...

06/08/2026

Scripps Research chemist Jin-Quan Yu is named a Fellow of the Royal Society

LA JOLLA, CA-Professor Jin-Quan Yu of Scripps Research has been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the U.K.'s national academy of sciences and ...

06/08/2026

Experimental HIV vaccine achieves a long-sought goal

LA JOLLA, CA-For years, researchers have been hoping for vaccines that protect people against not just one strain of HIV, but every strain of the quickly mutati...

06/08/2026

Calibr-Skaggs advances CLF065, a regenerative GLP-2 therapy, into two Phase 2 IBD studies

LA JOLLA, CA-The Calibr-Skaggs Institute for Innovative Medicines, the nonprofit...

06/08/2026

Chemists snap together complex 3D molecules from highly reactive radicals'-without losing their shape

LA JOLLA, CA-Building the complex 3D molecules needed for new medicines has alwa...

06/08/2026

A fentanyl countermeasure that adapts to combat future black-market drugs

LA JOLLA, CA-Fentanyl and related variants of the synthetic opioid kill more Americans each year than car accidents and gun violence combined. In too-high doses...

06/08/2026

Two Scripps Research assistant professors named 2026 Baxter Young Investigators

LA JOLLA, CA-What do decoding communication between organs and reimagining the future of genome editing have in common? They're among the scientific questio...

06/08/2026

Calibr-Skaggs awarded $5.1M by NIH to develop long-acting hepatitis B virus therapy

LA JOLLA, CA-Of the 1.2 million people living with HIV in the United States, app...

06/08/2026

Lab studies explain how new cancer drug works as it enters patient testing

LA JOLLA, CA-For some people, cancer immunotherapies are life-changing. These treatments can turn the body's own immune system against a tumor, either elimi...

06/08/2026

Newly identified molecule strengthens the eye's response to damage in retinal disease

LA JOLLA, CA-Many conditions that cause vision loss share a common feature: the ...

06/08/2026

Molecular scissors caught in action: A structural blueprint for RNA therapeutics

LA JOLLA, CA-RNA interference is a natural mechanism for living cells to control whether specific genes are being used or not. Crowned with the 2006 Nobel Priz...

06/08/2026

Immune molecule may drive excessive drinking in alcohol use disorder

LA JOLLA, CA-The drugs that keep rheumatoid arthritis in check may one day help people stop drinking. A new Scripps Research study shows that an anti-inflammato...

06/08/2026

Back in action: Researchers make drug-resistant bacteria vulnerable again

LA JOLLA, CA-Antibiotic resistance is one of the most urgent threats to global health, linked to an estimated 4.7 million deaths worldwide in 2019 alone. As mor...

06/08/2026

Scripps Research scientists demonstrate a faster, cheaper route to making critical drugs using common table sugar

LA JOLLA, CA-Some of the world's best-selling diabetes drugs depend on a che...

06/08/2026

Scripps Research scientists awarded $2M to advance global disease surveillance

LA JOLLA, CA-Detecting infectious disease threats early and responding quickly can dramatically alter the course of an infectious outbreak. Technologies such as...

06/08/2026

Joan Pulupa joins Scripps Research faculty to study the organization of DNA in brain cells and its links to neurodegeneration

LA JOLLA, CA-Molecular biophysicist Joan Pulupa will join Scripps Research in Ja...

06/08/2026

Scripps Research scientists train the immune system to make antibodies against numerous HIV strains

LA JOLLA, CA-HIV is globally so diverse, consisting of hundreds of thousands of ...

06/08/2026

ASG Ups Michele Ferreira to Chief Business Officer

Share Copy link Facebook X Linkedin Bluesky Email...

06/08/2026

WNBC and WNJU Expand New York Giants Deal

Share Copy link Facebook X Linkedin Bluesky Email...

06/08/2026

Utah Scientific to Highlight NBOSS at IBC 2026

Share Copy link Facebook X Linkedin Bluesky Email...

06/08/2026

Disney, TikTok Ink Global Short-Form Content-Sharing Deal

Share Copy link Facebook X Linkedin Bluesky Email...

06/08/2026

Kane Peterson Joins QuickLink's North America Team

Share Copy link Facebook X Linkedin Bluesky Email...

06/08/2026

FCC Returns $881 Million in Unused TV Broadcaster Relocation Funds

Share Copy link Facebook X Linkedin Bluesky Email...

06/08/2026

PlayBox Neo to highlight secure and scalable workflow del...

At this year's SET EXPO, PlayBox Neo will present recent innovations across its PlayBox Neo Suite and integrated range of broadcast media solutions. By show...

06/08/2026

Modern Streaming Solutions Private Limited Partners with...

Live demo at IBC2026 VisualOn Booth, Hall 5, Stand A55 Amsterdam, Netherlands Modern Streaming Solutions Private Limited, a rising force in India's dig...

06/08/2026

Screen Australia and YouTube Australia fund five new teams through eleventh Skip Ahead initiative

Screen Australia and YouTube Australia fund five new teams through eleventh Skip...

06/08/2026

How Karukera Studio Built a Media Production Hub with SNS EVO

How Karukera Studio Built a Media Production Hub with SNS EVO Melanie Ciotti August 5, 2026 0 Comments Hero images displays Karukera Studio in Sainte-...

06/08/2026

NHK drama series Rosanjin no Kamado shot on PYXIS 6K

NHK drama series Rosanjin no Kamado shot on PYXIS 6K Brie Clayton August 5, 2026 0 Comments Blackmagic PYXIS 6K and DaVinci Resolve Studio capture the...

06/08/2026

Camera Match: AutoSetup 3d Plugin / script for Photomontages- Cinema 4D

Camera Match: AutoSetup 3d Plugin / script for Photomontages- Cinema 4D Jamie Cardoso August 5, 2026 0 Comments If you do any kind of Architectural Vi...

06/08/2026

Documentary on the life and impact of Dnal Lunny to air on RT

In Time airs Monday 10 August at 9.35pm on RT One and RT Player In Time is the first film account of the life of D nal Lunny, one of the most influential Iri...

06/08/2026

Into the Omniverse: How Open World Models Push the Frontier of Physical AI

Editor's note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on how developers, 3D practitioners and enterprises can transform their workflows u...

06/08/2026

GeForce NOW Shakes Up August With 26 New Games

August is here, bringing 26 new games for GeForce NOW members. Command the seas in World of Warships: Legends and discover what's next in the GeForce NOW ...

05/08/2026

Thomson toolkit added to virtual hub built to strengthen climate storytelling

Thomson's Climate Crisis Toolkit for Media in Tanzania is being included in a new virtual library designed to ensure accurate and engaging storytelling arou...

05/08/2026

SVG Regional Sports Production Summit 2026: All Sessions Now Available to Watch on SVG PLAY

RSNs, teams, leagues, and streamers explore the present and future of local spor...

05/08/2026

SVG New Sponsor Spotlight: Hitachi Vantara's Lenny Khaitov on Building Resilient Data Infrastructure for Sports Production

As sports-production workflows generate larger volumes of unstructured data and ...