Clair hits $100M ARR embedding earned-wage access inside payroll platforms like Gusto and QuickBooks

Speaker 2: Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Our next guest is already in the waiting room. We have Nico Simko from Claire. He's the cofounder and CEO. How are doing, Nico? Welcome to the show.

Speaker 8: Hey, guys. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2: Thanks so much

Speaker 1: for Why helping

Speaker 2: don't you introduce yourself and the company a little bit and then give us the milestone? I want hit the gong.

Speaker 8: Amazing. Big day. Big day for us. Nico Simko here, founder and CEO of Claire. In a nutshell, what we do is we try to solve one of the biggest inefficiencies we think is in The US labor force, which is if you work today, need to wait two weeks for your paycheck. And so we try to distribute that as far as we can. And today the company has crossed a $100,000,000 in we announced a $100,000,000 in revenue run rate.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: So break down a little bit more how the business works. You guys are serving 5%, I believe, of small businesses in The US. You're integrated into the payroll system.

Speaker 2: Westo, QuickBooks, TriNet, the big guys.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And it's funny when I yeah. When I first started, I I was surprised that this was not like a a thing. Maybe it was or just at a much smaller scale. But as soon as I understood how payroll systems worked, I was wondering like why employees didn't get access to funds. Couldn't get access to them early if a payroll system like knew that they were

Speaker 2: They already worked.

Speaker 1: Still an active employee working. Feels like pretty easy to underwrite but it doesn't make sense for the company necessarily to be in that type of, you know, short term lending business. But yeah, walk through maybe like the history of this category, how you came upon the opportunity, and yeah, maybe even how you how you were kind of diligencing the opportunity early on. Because I imagine it was one of those things that maybe you're like, why doesn't this exist already? Am I missing something?

Speaker 8: You're making my life easy because basically that's very much in line of like what I think I had, but also many people that joined the company early, whether it's like employees, investors, so on and so forth. It's that, it's like look we live in an instant world, You can click a few buttons and get any movie you want in the world, But at the same time, if, you know, I was outside of the credit system, that's maybe a good tangent to go in. It's like I came to The US without any credit history. My parents are not from here.

Speaker 6: I was

Speaker 8: an f one student. I had a job at JP Morgan after college. I still couldn't get a credit card. I got so many denials.

Speaker 1: Were a student of f one? Formula one? No.

Speaker 3: I was an

Speaker 8: f one visa student. I wish I

Speaker 9: was a student in f one. But

Speaker 8: yeah, like no, the reality is like I went through this entire journey of being outside of the 25,000,000 people like that in the country, and then there's another, I would say roughly thirty, thirty five percent of The US workforce that is basically not in a prime category. And it's like, okay, if that's the case, and 50% of Americans work paycheck to paycheck, why can't credit be connected to the workplace? And of course, short term credit is one piece, but you can think about car loans. Right? There's lenders that really would like to extend credit to to to that asset, but at the same time, it's it's it's risky, and so can they can they create a way to kind of connect that via the payroll system? And and what it does, it decreases kind of the risk, decreases the cost to the consumers, and the entire system becomes more efficient. So honestly, couldn't stop talking about this for many years and ended up kind of like leaving JPMorgan and and starting the company.

Speaker 2: What was the MVP? Like, what was the first customer? Mhmm. Did you go to a payroll platform and try and integrate, or did you go direct to a company and have just a, like, a web app? Like, what do you need a bank charter for this? Like, money transfer licenses? Like, how does all that work to actually start this business?

Speaker 8: Yeah. Absolutely. A lot to unpack here, so I'll try to maybe take it high level, and then we we we break it down. But the idea, really first principle is my co founder and I sat down, and we realized like, okay, what is what is the the, you know, the perfect product? And the perfect product we we thought of at the time, left our jobs done in 2019, restarting incorporating everything in 2020, was if you could have a digital bank that connects to the workplace, and every single time you work, basically your funds are available in your bank account if you need them, that would be perfect. And it's instant, it's free, it's perfect, and that's the that's the trade off. That product did not work. And the simple reason why that product did not work is because when you're asking someone to move their entire financial life over to a new digital bank, it's a lot to ask for. It's like going on a date and asking somebody to get married on the first date. It's like it's a lot. Right? And so maybe that's where you'll end up, but like, you know, don't don't do it immediately. And and so we kind of like it made us a little bit more humble, and we spent a lot of time with our user base. My co founder like flew down to like public schools in in Georgia. Met met the principals around like how public school teachers don't get paid during the summer. They can only get paid monthly, and it's and then we start to realize that, you know, there's a way to do this, which is embedded inside of payroll. People trust their payroll system. We all sign up for, you know, anyways, healthcare products through through through payroll, and payroll companies are becoming workforce super apps. Right? Like, love the partners we work for because they really have this vision. They're like one app involves a lot of things, and and so we went after these providers, and we're like, look, we wanna we wanna foster your brand. We're not trying to send people to another app. So that's when we decided to to pivot in the company in two years kind of really, really accelerated when we took that strategy.

Speaker 2: Well, congratulations. I want the opposite of this. I would love to get Tyler working for, like, three months straight before we pay him a dime. So he has to put in ninety days of hard labor until he gets a single paycheck, sort of the opposite. Good. Yeah. Good things come to those who wait. No. Makes a ton of sense and congratulations on the progress. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Very very fascinating.

Speaker 8: Thank you

Speaker 1: so much. Yeah. Great to meet you, Nico.

Speaker 2: We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 8: Thank you for

Speaker 2: having me. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it.