With USD 1.8 M In Seed, Nigeria's PaidHR Goes From Managing Payroll To Managing Money

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With USD 1.8 M In Seed, Nigeria’s PaidHR Goes From Managing Payroll To Managing Money

PaidHR started with the simple idea of helping Nigeria’s businesses pay their staff reliably. Four years later, the Lagos-based HR-tech startup is making a case for itself as something more ambitious: an ecosystem for salaries, benefits, and the payments that link them.

Its new USD 1.8 M seed round, announced today and led by Accion Venture Lab, marks a pivotal moment in that evolution.

Since launching in 2020, PaidHR has ridden Nigeria’s brutal economic tides, finding ways to survive a currency devaluation that wiped out 70% of the naira’s value and shaped how businesses and staff think about their money.

What began as a basic HR and payroll tool has evolved into a multi-currency payments engine, a trend reshaping HR-tech globally.

Just as Rippling and Deel added wallets and cards to deepen their user relationships, PaidHR has leveraged Nigeria’s payroll pain points to build an employee wallet that now processes over NGN 1.3 B a month (roughly USD 835 K) from staff choosing to spend within the app itself.

For co-founder and CEO Seye Bandele, it’s about making “spending where you earn” seamless. An employee can draw earned wages early (basically get loaned a portion of pay before payday), pay for data, airtime, and transport in-app, and even hedge devaluation by converting salaries into other currencies.

This cross-border payroll feature — supporting 49 currencies — allows firms to pay staff globally, making PaidHR a conduit for dollar and euro revenues that were elusive in Nigeria’s crisis-hit market.

In a country where small firms struggle with fragmented banking and broken operational flows, PaidHR has quietly built a multi-layered model.

Its subscription payroll service captures businesses, its Earned Wage Access (EWA) feature delivers a liquidity cushion for staff, and its wallet captures transaction margins from daily expenses.

Meanwhile, the cross-border product taps into FX spreads as global firms hire African talent. And, PaidHR reportedly has partnerships in place with licensed fintechs like Risevest to offer savings and FX investment options directly from the wallet.

The results have been telling. By the end of 2024, PaidHR processed NGN 29 B in salaries, more than doubling its tally at the end of the prior year. Its total funding now stands at USD 2.9 M (it raised USD 500 K and USD 600 K in two previous rounds), and its growth mirrors Nigeria’s shift from a market reliant on raw human effort to one increasingly shaped by embedded finance.

PaidHR plans to deepen its market share within Nigeria, accelerate product development, and expand its customer success teams with the latest round of funding.

Bandele doesn’t call PaidHR a fintech, but its direction suggests as much. What started as a SaaS HR tool is quickly becoming an infrastructure platform for African salaries, capturing value every step of the way. That looks a winning formula in a market where margins are thin and trust is rare.