Gusto

Gusto is a cloud-based human resources platform that consolidates payroll processing, employee benefits administration, HR workflows, and compliance tools into a single product targeted at small and mid-size businesses. Founded in 2011 as ZenPayroll by Josh Reeves, Tomer London, and Edward Kim — and backed by Y Combinator's Winter 2012 batch — the company rebranded to Gusto in September 2015 as it expanded beyond payroll into health insurance, 401(k) administration, and workers' compensation. By early 2026 Gusto surpassed one billion dollars in annual recurring revenue and served more than 400,000 business customers with a team of roughly 2,400 employees.

The Problem Gusto Solves

Running payroll and benefits for a small business has historically required juggling multiple vendors: a payroll processor, a separate benefits broker, state-by-state compliance filings, and for companies with global contractors, an international wire system that routinely takes three to seven business days to settle. For the contractor waiting on payment, that delay creates real cash-flow pressure. For the employer, it creates administrative overhead and uncertainty. Gusto's thesis since its founding has been to collapse those separate systems into one interface that handles calculation, filing, and disbursement automatically — letting a business owner focus on running the company rather than managing back-office plumbing.

Core Product and How It Works

The platform operates as a SaaS layer on top of standard payroll infrastructure. Employers enter compensation details, add employees or contractors as they are hired, and Gusto handles tax withholding calculations, direct deposit disbursement, quarterly and annual tax filings (including W-2s and 1099s), and new-hire reporting. Benefits enrollment — health, dental, vision, and retirement — is embedded in the same interface, with Gusto acting as the licensed insurance broker and plan administrator.

For contractors specifically, Gusto supports both domestic and international payees. Domestic contractors receive payments via ACH. International contractors had historically been limited to slower wire transfers until Gusto extended its payment options in early 2026.

Solana Integration: USDC Stablecoin Payouts for International Contractors

In January 2026 Gusto announced a partnership with Zerohash, a regulated stablecoin infrastructure provider, to pilot instant stablecoin-based payouts for contractors outside the US. The integration entered beta in January and expanded into a full product launch in March 2026, when Gusto introduced two new same-day options for international contractor payments: Wise Account transfers and Stablecoin via [[TOKEN:EPjFWdd5AufqSSqeM2qN1xzybapC8G4wEGGkZwyTDt1v]] (USDC).

The USDC option settles on Solana. Eligible employers initiate payment in a single click within the Gusto dashboard using the same workflow they would for any other payroll run. Zerohash's infrastructure converts and routes the payment on-chain, and the contractor receives USDC into a custodial or self-custodial crypto wallet in under one minute — compared to the three-to-seven-day delay that previously applied to international bank transfers.

Because USDC is pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, contractors in markets with volatile local currencies receive exactly the amount that was sent, without exchange-rate exposure at the moment of settlement. The on-chain settlement also provides a transparent, traceable payment record for both employer and contractor without relying on correspondent banking networks or banking hours.

Zerohash supports payouts across more than 200 jurisdictions, which gives Gusto coverage for the international contractor relationships that 11 percent of its customer base was managing as of 2025 — a segment that had previously been difficult to pay quickly through conventional rails.

Why Solana

The choice to build the stablecoin payout feature on Solana reflects the network's advantages for high-throughput payment use cases: near-instant finality, low per-transaction costs, and a mature USDC issuance and liquidity ecosystem. From Gusto's perspective, the underlying blockchain is largely invisible to users — employers see a payroll line item and contractors see a wallet credit — but Solana's speed and cost profile make sub-minute global settlement commercially viable at the transaction volumes a platform processing tens of billions of dollars in payroll annually requires.

Regulatory and Compliance Posture

Zerohash holds regulatory licenses across multiple US states and international jurisdictions and performs on-chain compliance screening and transaction monitoring as part of the integration. This matters for Gusto, which operates in a highly regulated space: one of the primary reasons Gusto selected Zerohash was specifically its regulatory posture and operational maturity at scale. Samant Nagpal, Gusto's Head of Payments and Risk, noted at launch that zerohash's regulatory posture and global infrastructure allow the company to offer stablecoin payouts in a way that is simple, compliant, and scalable.

Scale and Company Trajectory

Gusto processes tens of billions of dollars in payroll payments each year. In August 2025 the company acquired Guideline, a 401(k) provider, for approximately 600 million dollars, deepening its retirement benefits offerings. In April 2026 it acquired Mosey, a payroll compliance startup, adding automated multi-state compliance to its platform. The company's valuation stood at approximately 9.3 billion dollars based on a June 2025 employee tender offer.

Fit in the Solana Ecosystem

Gusto's integration represents the type of enterprise-grade, real-world payment use case that Solana's payments stack is increasingly designed to serve. Rather than a crypto-native DeFi protocol, Gusto is a mainstream business software company embedding Solana as settlement infrastructure for a specific, high-value pain point: cross-border contractor payments. For the Solana ecosystem, a platform with 400,000 business customers adopting USDC on Solana as a default payment rail is a meaningful indicator of the network's readiness for large-scale B2B payment applications.