Gusto

Gusto, Inc. is a payroll, benefits and human-resources platform for small and medium-sized businesses in the United States. It was founded in November 2011 as ZenPayroll by Joshua Reeves, Edward Kim and Tomer London, went through Y Combinator's Winter 2012 batch, and launched publicly in California on 11 December 2012. In September 2015 it renamed itself Gusto as it widened its scope from payroll alone to health insurance and workers' compensation.

The core product runs payroll and the federal, state and local tax filings that follow it. Around that sit benefits administration, hiring and onboarding, time tracking, HR tooling and, since the acquisitions of Guideline and Mosey, retirement plans and compliance registrations. Pricing is a monthly subscription plus a per-employee fee, so revenue expands with a customer's headcount and with the number of modules it adopts rather than with seat count.

Alongside the direct business, Gusto Embedded Payroll lets other software companies and banks put Gusto's payroll engine inside their own products under their own brand, with revenue shared back to Gusto. U.S. Bank launched U.S. Bank Payroll on that infrastructure in September 2025, giving Gusto a route to the bank's more than 1.4 million small-business clients; an earlier embedded partnership with Chase Payments Solutions was announced in 2023.

Gusto has also grown by acquisition. It bought the payroll-infrastructure company Symmetry, the R&D tax-credit tool Ardius and the global-hiring product RemoteTeam in 2021, agreed to buy the small-business 401(k) provider Guideline for roughly $600 million in August 2025, and acquired the compliance startup Mosey in April 2026. Its competitors range from the incumbents ADP, Paychex and Intuit to the newer HR platforms Rippling and Deel.

The company told TechCrunch in May 2026 that it had passed $1 billion in trailing twelve-month revenue, that growth had accelerated in each of the previous five quarters, and that it had been cash-flow positive for several years. Its last published mark is $9.3 billion, set in a June 2025 employee tender offer led by Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan; it has raised roughly $746 million in primary capital and has not filed publicly for an IPO.