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Managing payroll is difficult in any country, but perhaps especially so in Brazil thanks to ever-changing laws and powerful unions that make it incredibly difficult to get it right. Fernando Gadotti faced this as co-founder and CEO of DogHero, the LatAm version of Rover. When Gadotti left the company in 2022, after selling it in 2020, he decided that was where he wanted to focus next.
“Every time payroll came in, it was a struggle, like it was horrible, for several hours, just like double checking the data back and forth, and we couldn’t really get any visibility that we needed,” Gadotti told TechCrunch. “(We were) largely working in the dark, and as we continued to grow, it struck me that these issues weren’t actually just annoying; they were actually slowing down the company. We were wasting a lot of time in busy work.”
Just a few months after leaving DogHero, Gadotti began working on São Paulo-based Tako, an employee lifecycle platform that automates tasks like onboarding and payroll to save companies time and gather all their employee information in one place. Tako also provides employees with a dashboard to view information and access an interactive payment receipt that aims to increase transparency.
Although there are legacy American payroll companies operating in Brazil, such as ADP, it makes sense to have a local solution because Brazil’s pay system is quite unique, Gadotti said. He said that laws related to salaries change frequently. There are also 10,000 unions — companies often have employees in more than one union — that update their rules several times a year as well, sometimes with more power than the actual laws, he said.
Tako uses LLM (Large Language Model) to keep up with these constant changes. LLM ingests and ingests labor law and union law data so that Tako developers can update the code base. He said they want to keep humans informed to ensure accuracy, but having an LLM degree ahead of time saves a lot of time.
Tako launched its product in 2023. Gadotti said the company processed tens of millions of dollars in payroll because it operated surreptitiously but declined to share more details about its customers. The company is currently targeting mid-market companies with 100 to 500 employees in the professional and financial services categories, Gadotti said.
“The strategy we have is that we are not trying to boil the ocean,” Gadotti said. “We want to start in a sector we know before venturing into more complex industries or areas. We started with simpler segments; as the company grows, we will move into more complex segments in the future.
Tako is coming out of stealth with a major $13.2 million funding round co-led by Ribbit Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. The round also included ONEVC and the founders of Ramp. The company plans to allocate the majority of capital toward research and development as well as double or triple the number of employees on its research and development team, Gadotti said.
There are a lot of potential areas that Tako can expand into in the future, such as the wider world of employee benefits. Gadotti said the company plans to expand as it grows to build more features such as instant payments.
In addition to competing with legacy companies like ADP, there are many other HR technology startups in the country such as Gobi and Cashewboth of which focus more on other areas within human resources and employee management. But if Taco expands into these areas, which is likely to happen, these companies could also become strong competitors.
The name Taku is Japanese for “octopus,” which is how Gadotti said he was thinking about this work. The Tako platform aims to be the brain of employee data, extending its tentacles into different areas of employee management.
“We want to focus on the entire employee lifecycle,” Gadotti said. “We are constantly listening to our customers’ pain points and where they want us to help them.”
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