Central (YC S24)

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Central (YC S24) automates payroll, benefits, government filings, business insurance, and other back-office work for founders – saving weeks of work and fines. Today, founders face endless back-office chores. They must register for payroll in each state via outdated websites, set up worker's compensation, file statements of information, and more. These tasks take time and distract from finding product-market fit. Worse, many founders, like Nilay Modi, pay thousands in fines each year due to mistakes. With Central, founders don't have to do any of this work. Zero. Central handles everything automatically from start to finish. Need to find or update something? Do it through their website, or simply ask Central's AI bot on Slack. It's like your startup's first head of HR/finance! The Central team, Josh Wymer, Pranav Kashyap, and especially Nilay, understands this pain firsthand. Now, they're on a mission to liberate founders so they can focus on creating value. In less than 18 months, they've served 50+ YC companies and are continuing to grow. Congrats on the launch, Josh, Pranav, and Nilay — and welcome to YC! Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gQ6eHmuC

Jeff Bezos has a great video about how to focus on making your beer taste better. The story goes that during the industrial revolution, some breweries were continuing to make their own electric power, rather than using the grid and outsourcing electricity generation. Being the best brewery at generating electricity did nothing to improve the taste of your beer. In startups, the same metaphor applies. As a founder, you’re going to win by having the best product for your customers and finding product-market fit, not by running the best payroll, or having the best California unemployment registration. Unfortunately, most of the payroll platforms in the market today are designed for HR people, and not for founders. Founders are expected to do their own research and figure out how to run their payroll, HR, compliance, and benefits. Whats worse, not only do you not win by doing these things better, you actually get severe penalties by doing them incorrectly. These issues get magnified when you hire employees in new states, or want to start getting health insurance set up, hire people on visas, or move addresses. Each state and city has their own local nuances on how you need to hire employees, pay taxes, run payroll, and more. You also need to get related services like paid family leave, workers compensation, set up a 401k from other companies to stay compliant. This is why, I'm excited to announce Central (YC S24), the easiest way to run a company. Central's mission is to liberate founders to create value. We want you to go find Product-Market fit and be free from the shackles of ongoing ops work. Today, when you sign up with Central you can: - Hire and pay employees in all 50 states plus contractors in 200+ countries - Get Health, Disability, and Life insurance and 401(k) accounts - Get other business insurance like workers compensation, general liability etc. - Automate ongoing mail monitoring Finally, you can talk to Central Bot directly in Slack and get things done 24/7. Think of Central Bot as your first HR/Finance/Ops hire. You can hire, pay, search company and employee info, send and receive documents, ask questions, and much more just by typing. Learn more at https://getcentralhq.com/

Saw a new payroll + benefits company recently on public YC launches - Central (YC S24). The founders paid $20,000 in government fines for missing payroll-related notices. Now they have built a comprehensive tool to manage payroll + compliance + treasury + back-office. They have this interesting angle that they are also signing up customers for virtual mail. So they receive all the mail for the client and have internal tools to parse that and take action. This reduces any notification misses due to physical mail (missing physical mail and not taking action is the main reason companies get fines). We had that Stilt too. We were registered in 25 states and got a lot of government mail. They are joining a number of companies providing similar services like Every, Warp, and big ones like Gusto, Rippling, and Deel. Will be interesting to see how the market plays out.

?? Our friends at Ply Health (YC S24) recently launched! Ply Health uses AI to help behavioral health providers get in-network with insurance companies faster, reducing the time and effort needed for enrollment. This speeds up the process, allowing providers to start billing quicker and saving them months of waiting. Congrats Samantha Wu & David Zhang!!

?? Our friends at Apten (YC S24) just launched! They help B2C businesses automate sales, marketing, and customer service through SMS text. It?proactively reaches out, responds at any time, and never forgets to follow up. Apten won’t just chat - it’ll?take actions?in a way a human would including: - Categorizing/tagging leads based on the conversation - Creating notifications based on conditions you define - Determining the appropriate time to follow-up based on a lead's response Learn more at https://www.apten.ai/ Congrats Daniel Ho & Roshan Kumaraswamy!