Let’s talk about scale, not just headcount or ARR, but real scale. Infrastructure, compliance, intelligence. The kind of scale that makes CFOs sleep better and HR leaders stop grinding teeth at midnight. Niural just dropped a $31M Series A to do exactly that, and the story behind it? It’s what happens when you build AI from the ground up instead of pasting it to something built in 1986.
Founded in 2022 by Nami Baral and Nabin Banskota, Niural isn’t your off-the-shelf PEO. It’s AI-native, globally tuned, and razor-focused on the distributed, fast-growth companies that are scaling past the spreadsheets but not quite ready to build internal payroll empires. Think payroll, compliance, payments, benefits, handled across 150+ countries, in 100+ currencies, with a platform that actually knows what it’s doing. That’s not just software, it’s system intelligence.
And when Marathon Management Partners steps in to lead the round, alongside M13, Inspired Capital, Newform Capital, and strategic angels, you know the smart money’s paying attention. Not just to the metrics (though a 700% ARR growth curve is hard to ignore), but to the architecture. Niural isn’t bolting AI onto a legacy stack. This is what happens when your co-founders previously built AI negotiation systems before ChatGPT was a household name. Their last company, Harvest? Acquired by Acorns. Their new one? Designed for this decade’s global CFOs.
The platform’s core is EMMA, an executional AI coworker that doesn’t just observe but acts. Real-time payroll anomaly detection, onboarding, FX ops, back-office grind reduction. Clients like Tensor, Polygon Labs, and Karate.com aren’t showing up for a prettier dashboard, they’re buying back time, cutting HR costs by 50%, reducing payroll errors by 90%, and avoiding the “oops, we forgot to file in Luxembourg” moment.
And then there’s the detail that tells you this isn’t just a SaaS hustle. Gokul Rajaram, yeah, that Gokul, is now on the board. Coinbase, Pinterest, The Trade Desk, and now Niural. That kind of chess move doesn’t just validate the company, it signals that the infrastructure being built here has layers. Payments, compliance, ERP integrations, tax logic built from scratch. This isn’t copy-paste HR tech, it’s the modern stack for modern finance.
This $31M isn’t the celebration. It’s the gear shift. Niural’s aiming to be the financial operating system for every high-growth company that’s scaling without the bloat. The ones expanding in 10 countries with 50 people and no margin for manual error. It’s not just about automating payroll. It’s about executing at scale with AI that’s not guessing.
