September 10, 2026
Today, we’re announcing $10 million in funding from Crosslink Capital, UKG Ventures, CloudPay, Character Capital, Behind Genius Ventures, and leading angel investors to build Intermezzo, an AI-native global payroll platform.
Kumar and I started Intermezzo with a straightforward belief: the infrastructure behind global payroll needs to be rebuilt. Getting paid correctly and on time should be a given, wherever someone works. Making that happen across borders still requires an extraordinary amount of manual work.
For an HCM platform expanding internationally, each country introduces a new set of tax rules, statutory deductions, reporting requirements, and filing deadlines. Supporting those requirements often means assembling a network of local payroll providers, each with its own processes and systems.
The people connecting those systems carry much of the burden. They reconcile spreadsheets, exchange sensitive information over email, clarify local requirements, and chase approvals. Essential payroll knowledge lives in documents and in people’s heads. When a regulation changes, that knowledge has to make its way through the entire chain.
These teams do difficult, consequential work. They deserve better infrastructure.
Kumar and I have spent our careers building financial and workforce technology. At Intuit, I served as Chief Architect of Small Business and Kumar served as Chief Data Architect and the QuickBooks platform leader. We worked together again at Pebl (formerly Velocity Global) as CTO and Chief Architect. These experiences shaped how we approached Intermezzo. Payroll requires both a deep understanding of local rules and the engineering discipline to turn those rules into dependable software. Read rest here.