Borderless AI founders Willson Cross (l) and Sean Aggarwal (r). F ew HR startups have grown faster or seen more venture capital funding in recent years than so-called “employers of record,” as the disruption of the pandemic accelerated employers’ appetite for hiring in far-flung locales. These companies, which employ workers on behalf of other firms through local entities, saw big capital raises and rapid growth as hiring took off around the globe. Companies like Remote, Velocity Global and Deel —which Forbes called one of the fastest-growing software startups in Silicon Valley history—each saw funding rounds of $300 million or more in 2021 or 2022. Now, a new startup wants to try and find its place in that crowded market, emerging from stealth with $27 million in seed funding and an “AI agent” that automates certain HR tasks, such as onboarding or paying international workers. Borderless AI , which performs tasks like generating employment agreements using its AI agent Alberni, says it can complete such tasks in minutes rather than days. Co-founded by Lyft board member and early investor Sean Aggarwal, a former finance executive at Trulia, PayPal and eBay, as well as entrepreneur Willson Cross, the company is partnering with AI model developer Cohere , augmenting its large language model with proprietary data specific to employment law around the globe. Unlike a chatbot that only responds to questions about, say, what the rules are for writing employment contracts in
Sweden, Alberni also does the task itself, generating that agreement, processing global new hire paperwork or reimbursing global expense requests. “AI makes a really good case for solving a lot of the still mundane and semi-automated tasks that go into onboarding and paying international workforces,” Cross says. Cross says the funding round, led by Susquehanna and Aglaé Ventures , the venture arm of billionaire Bernard Arnault , will help Borderless grow into more geographies and invest in AI. So far, customers primarily include small- to mid-sized tech firms adding workers in markets like
Canada, northern Europe and the U.K. (Cross would not share revenues or a valuation for the company, but said booked customer demos are up 60% month over month.) He says the funding will also help Borderless eventually sell services to much larger companies that don’t need employers of record, but want direct access to using its agent, Alberni , to automate some of their in-house HR tasks . The launch comes amid increased investment in AI tools focused on specific “verticals,” such as Harvey , which augments AI models with legal expertise, or Sierra, which is focused on AI for customer service. Cross says the company, which has roughly 30 employees, is operational in 170 countries. Yet Borderless also launches into an established market of large, entrenched players like Velocity Global and Deel—which now offer a much broader range of HR services—at a time when employers are trying to get workers together in person more often and tech hiring has cooled. In February, tech-related
Job postings were 25% below pre-pandemic levels, declining 2.7% in the prior three months, according to data from jobs site Indeed . Meanwhile, HR executives who buy services or tools for global hiring put a priority on compliance and customer experience—speed and efficiency are much lower on the list, says Gartner vice president John Kostoulas. “It's not a volume business—it’s not like you hire like a ton of people” for remote global roles, he says. What matters to companies is that the developer in Kenya or engineer in Bulgaria is hired compliantly, he says, not “if it takes more minutes to do the workflow.” Another Gartner analyst, Eser Rizaoglu, says getting new HR tech to work with existing systems is a common challenge. Cross says compliance is a “must” for Borderless and that it works with legal partners PwC and Norton Rose Fulbright to curate knowledge for its model, fine-tuning how retrieved information is organized. “Our single, sole focus right now is building best-in-class, trustworthy, accurate AI models to bring to companies to benefit and service their international hiring needs,” he says. Cross points to data from IEC Group that shows the EOR market is expected to add $1 billion a year through 2028, and says Borderless integrates with other systems. Speed and cost are bigger issues for smaller firms, he says. That was the case for Affiniti, a tiny fintech startup that has used Borderless to bring on engineers in
India,
Turkey and Canada. “We needed an engineer literally that week to build out new features,” says founder Aaron Bai. “We were able to do that without much concern on the HR side.” The startup, Cross’s sophomore effort and a world away from his first venture—a pet-sitting marketplace called GoFetch.ca, which was acquired in 2018 —got its start after Cross says he and Aggarwal, who he cold-emailed with an introduction, saw the challenges of global hiring during past jobs. They chose fellow Toronto-based Cohere, Cross says, for its focus on data safety as well as how it retrieves and presents information. For HR, says Jonathan Rosenbluth, Cohere’s director of product, “it’s important they can go and verify the sources of information,” saying Cohere, which works with enterprises, provides citations and doesn’t train its model on private data. “We wouldn't even have access to see the information that’s being passed through the model, never mind training on it.”