PayFit: European Payroll and HR Platform Serving 20,000+ Companies

Nobody starts a company just because they are excited about payroll. But three Frenchmen who met during school looked at the tangled mess of European labor regulation and saw a $2 billion opportunity. PayFit, the Paris-based payroll and HR automation platform, has raised $496 million in venture capital, earned a unicorn valuation, survived a bruising round of layoffs and emerged as one of the most closely watched HR tech companies on the continent. For payroll professionals tracking the competitive landscape, the question is no longer whether PayFit is serious. It is whether the company can convert a decade of heavy investment into lasting market dominance.

The Founding Bet

PayFit was co-founded in 2015 by Firmin Zocchetto, Ghislain de Fontenay and Florian Fournier. Zocchetto, who serves as CEO, studied at ESCP Business School and completed an M&A internship at Citi before deciding he would rather build something than advise on other people’s deals. De Fontenay, the CTO, had already launched a social networking startup with Zocchetto while the two were still students. Fournier, an École Polytechnique graduate, leads product.

Their founding insight will be familiar to anyone who has ever run a French payroll: the complexity is staggering. Approximately 7,000 parameters feed into a single net salary calculation once collective agreements, social contributions and tax codes are applied. Layer on hundreds of sector-specific collective bargaining agreements that can override standard rules, and you have a system that practically begs for automation. Legacy providers handled it through clunky, fragmented software designed for specialists. PayFit bet that a modern, cloud-native platform could bring payroll in-house for the thousands of SMBs that lacked the expertise or budget to manage it properly.

JetLang: The Engine Room

The company’s most distinctive technical asset is JetLang, a proprietary programming language de Fontenay built to encode labor law as machine-readable logic. If that sounds niche, consider the practical implications. JetLang allows non-developers on PayFit’s team, internally called “Product Builders,” to translate the rules of a country’s labor code directly into the platform. No conventional software engineering required.

This is what makes cross-border expansion feasible. When PayFit enters a new market, a small team of Product Builders encodes the local regulatory framework in JetLang and deploys a compliant product significantly faster than competitors building in traditional code. When a government changes its legislation, updates are pushed centrally across the entire client base. More than 80% of the platform’s admin pages in France are generated through JetLang.

For payroll professionals, the real-world payoff is straightforward: regulatory updates, whether to RTI submission rules in the UK, social declaration requirements in France or collective agreement modifications, are handled by PayFit rather than requiring manual intervention from each client. The platform automatically produces payslips, pension submissions, accounting journals and statutory reports. It carries HMRC approval in the UK and ISO 27001 certification. Payroll journals are compatible with major accounting software, and a partnership with BambooHR, launched in 2022, gives UK customers a combined HRIS and payroll workflow.

Following the Money

PayFit’s fundraising moved fast, even by European tech standards. A $5.6 million Series A in October 2016, led by Accel, came when the company had just 40 employees and 60 clients. Accel’s bet looked prescient: by mid-2017, a $16 million Series B followed. Eurazeo and Bpifrance, the French state investment bank, joined in a 2019 Series C. A $107 million Series D closed in March 2021.

Then came the big one. In January 2022, PayFit closed a $289 million Series E led by General Atlantic, the New York growth equity firm whose portfolio includes Airbnb, Spotify and UiPath. Eurazeo, Bpifrance and Accel Ventures also participated. The round valued PayFit at $2.1 billion, making it the 23rd French tech unicorn. Total capital raised across five rounds: $496 million from 21 investors.

It was, by any measure, a lot of money for a payroll company. But the thesis was clear. Every business in Europe runs payroll every month. Switching providers is painful. And the SMB segment, historically underserved by the Sages and ADPs of the world, represented an enormous addressable market.

Reality Check

The euphoria did not last. Like much of European tech, PayFit was caught in the venture capital correction that swept through the industry as interest rates rose and investor appetite for unprofitable growth evaporated. In March 2023, barely 14 months after announcing the Series E with plans to hire 400 people, the company cut approximately 200 jobs, roughly 20% of its workforce, across France, Germany and Spain.

The restructuring was painful but clarifying. PayFit emerged with tighter cost discipline and a sharper focus on unit economics. Revenue kept climbing: approximately $155.7 million in 2024, up from $105 million the year before, $74 million in 2022 and $40.5 million in 2021. A near-fourfold increase in three years, powered by the sticky, recurring nature of payroll SaaS. The company now employs roughly 800 people.

Where PayFit Fits in the Market

The European payroll automation space is getting crowded. PayFit competes with incumbents like Sage, ADP and Workday, alongside venture-backed platforms including Personio, Factorial and Rippling.

The sharpest comparison is with Personio, the Munich-based HR platform valued at $8.5 billion at its 2022 peak. The two companies are tackling overlapping territory from opposite directions. Personio built a broad HRIS spanning recruiting, workflows and performance management, then added payroll. PayFit built deep payroll automation first and has been expanding outward into HR. For payroll professionals evaluating both, the distinction matters: PayFit’s JetLang architecture gives it stronger multi-jurisdiction compliance automation, while Personio offers a wider HR feature set.

Against legacy incumbents, PayFit’s pitch is accessibility. Sage and ADP built their platforms for payroll specialists. PayFit targets office managers, HR generalists and business owners at companies with 1 to 200 employees who need accurate, compliant payroll without deep technical expertise. CEO Zocchetto has admitted publicly that the company initially overreached by targeting larger enterprises before recognizing this SMB sweet spot as its natural home.

The switching cost dynamic is worth noting. Any payroll professional knows that migrating providers mid-year, re-mapping tax codes, transferring year-to-date figures and validating historical data carries significant operational risk. Once a client is onboarded, they tend to stay. PayFit’s subscription model, priced per employee per month, turns that stickiness into predictable recurring revenue.

What Comes Next

PayFit operates across France, the UK, Spain and Germany, with offices in Paris, London, Barcelona and Berlin. France remains the dominant market. The company brought in a new CTO and CFO in 2023 to support whatever the next chapter looks like.

An IPO remains a possibility, though no timeline has been disclosed. European listing conditions have improved markedly, with global IPO proceeds rising 39% in 2025 according to EY. Profitable SaaS businesses are finding receptive public markets, and PayFit’s revenue trajectory would make it a plausible candidate. Secondary share trading on platforms like EquityZen suggests ongoing investor interest behind the scenes.

The bigger question is strategic. The vast majority of European SMBs still manage payroll through legacy software, outsourced bureaus or manual spreadsheets. PayFit has spent nearly a decade and half a billion dollars in venture capital building proprietary technology to capture that market. The revenue growth suggests the product works. The layoffs suggest the path to profitability required more discipline than the founders initially anticipated. For payroll professionals watching the sector evolve, PayFit’s next moves will say a great deal about whether automation-first platforms can genuinely displace the entrenched providers that have dominated European payroll for decades.