Eynat Guez

1,000 VCs passed on her idea. Today, it’s a $3.7B global payroll company.

After seven years managing large-scale infrastructure projects in Africa, Eynat Guez launched a relocation services company in 2009.

Followed by another business helping companies expand into East Asia.

These weren’t flashy tech ventures.

But they gave her exposure to a major problem: the chaos of managing and paying a global workforce.

In 2016, she co-founded Papaya Global to streamline and unify global payroll, compliance, and cross-border payments into a single platform.

For companies hiring in 20, 50, or even 160 countries, Papaya promised one system to manage it all.

Salaries, taxes, benefits, currency conversions, local labor laws…

Over the next three years, Eynat pitched the idea to hundreds of VCs.

She heard “no” more than 1,000 times.

Many didn’t believe global payroll was a real pain point.

When they asked CEOs in their portfolios, the answer was usually, “No problem here.”

The issue? CEOs rarely touch payroll.

CFOs and operations teams do.

And THEY were drowning in complexity.

While investors passed, Guez doubled down on revenue.

By the time she finally raised her Series A, Papaya Global was already doing $7M in ARR.

With less than $3M raised.

Once the investors started listening, she shifted her pitch.

She stopped trying to sell the product and started selling the business.

“They’re not here to buy my product,” she explained. “They are here to understand why customers are buying my products and what are the revenue metrics.”

Today, Papaya processes over $34B in annual payments.

The platform operates in 160+ countries and supports 130 currencies.

All with built-in compliance and automation.

The company has raised $450M from top firms like Sequoia, Bessemer, Insight Partners, and Greenoaks.

She also led the acquisition of Azimo, a UK-based payments company, to strengthen Papaya’s infrastructure and gain money transfer licenses across regions.

In 2025, Papaya added Citibank to its banking partners, alongside JPMorgan.

These two giants now power 85–90% of Papaya’s business.

The company expects to hit $200M in revenue and reach profitability this year.

And she built all of this while raising three children.

When she closed a $100M funding round in 2021, she had just given birth to her third child.

In 2025, she also became an investor.

She backed a startup called Era, co-founded by Omri Shtivi and his brother, in memory of their sibling Idan, who was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas on October 7.

She believes you can’t scale a company if you aren’t willing to reassess everything, from your org chart to your own role, at every stage.

As she puts it: “Every summer, I look at my kids’ clothes and realize nothing fits anymore. The same is true for Papaya. We have to redesign the company every year.”