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.

That is what we’re building.

Intermezzo gives HCM platforms, employer-of-record providers, and payroll bureaus a single API through which they can embed international payroll into their own products. Underneath that API is a native payroll engine that handles country-specific calculations and filing requirements.

AI plays a specific role in this architecture. Our agents extract payroll knowledge from source material and convert it into structured, machine-readable rules. The payroll engine uses those rules to calculate pay and support the filings and reporting that follow.

Encoding that knowledge in software makes it possible to automate work that has historically required repeated manual interpretation and coordination.

Through Intermezzo, platforms can calculate gross-to-net pay in real time, accounting for local taxes and deductions. They can generate payslips, automate tax filings and compliance reporting, sync payroll data with accounting systems, and run payroll on demand. These capabilities are available through a unified interface that partners can embed under their own brand.

The impact can be substantial: Intermezzo can bring a 20-day payroll processing cycle down to 24 hours, with accuracy above 99%. For platforms and the employers they serve, that means less time coordinating a payroll run and a much shorter path from payroll inputs to results.

Our ambition is to make international payroll a capability that platforms can build on with confidence. Expanding into another country will become easier because the underlying infrastructure already understands how payroll works there.

This funding supports that work. We’re especially encouraged to have investors and partners who understand both the demands of financial infrastructure and the practical complexity of workforce technology. Their backing reflects a shared belief that payroll can work much better than it does today.

We're grateful to our investors and to the team building Intermezzo. There is a great deal of detailed, demanding work ahead. We’re building for a responsibility that matters every payday: helping people receive the money they’ve earned, accurately and on time.

If you’re building an HCM, EOR, or payroll platform we’d love to discuss how Intermezzo can help make payroll more accurate and efficient for your customers

sid@intermezzo.ai

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Thank you to Ryan Lawler at Axios for covering the news

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