I recently sat down with Mern Singh and Jake Johnson from Bolto to talk about what they’re building and why we were excited to lead their Series A at Standard Capital.
At a high level, Bolto is an AI-native recruiting, payroll, and compliance platform. The idea is simple: companies should be able to find people, hire them, pay them, and manage them compliantly in one place. In practice, that has historically meant stitching together recruiters, payroll vendors, HR tools, contractor systems, EOR providers, and a lot of manual work.
Bolto starts with recruiting, which is what makes the product different. Most companies either hire one agency, run a fragmented internal process, or cobble together a set of tools that do not really talk to each other. With Bolto, a company can post a role and have recruiters in that geography compete to fill it. Instead of one recruiter working a role, you can get leverage from a broader marketplace. Once the hire is made, that person can move directly into payroll, HR, and compliance.
That workflow matters because hiring is not separate from the rest of people operations. The moment you decide to bring someone onto a team, you need to know how to onboard them, classify them, pay them, manage them, and stay compliant. Bolto’s insight is that recruiting is the natural starting point for a much larger HR platform.
The customer examples are compelling. Bolto has worked with companies from seed-stage startups all the way to public enterprises. One customer started using Bolto as a four-person startup and scaled with the platform as they hired internationally. Another company migrated roughly 400 people from Gusto, a process that would normally take one to two months, and Bolto helped complete it in two to three weeks.
The product is useful for two very different kinds of companies. Early-stage founders can use Bolto to find their first engineers or operators without needing to become recruiting experts. Larger companies can use it to reduce the time and money they spend on agencies, while consolidating more of their HR stack into one system.
We also talked about the future of work. Mern and Jake believe the workforce is going to become a mix of employees, contractors, and AI agents. That sounds futuristic, but they are already seeing customers operate with humans and agents side by side. Whether the worker is a person or an AI agent, companies still need systems for discovery, management, payment, and compliance. Bolto is building for that world.
Bolto is hiring across Seattle, Chicago, and San Francisco, with engineering centered in Seattle. Their pitch to candidates is very direct: this is a fast-moving team working on a big, messy, important problem. It is not a place to hide. It is a place to level up quickly.
Finally, I asked why they chose Standard. What stood out to them was the peer board: the chance to be around other post-PMF founders dealing with similar problems. That is exactly what we are trying to build at Standard Capital.
People operations is being rebuilt from the ground up. Recruiting, payroll, compliance, and HR are converging into one system, and AI makes the need for a new architecture even more obvious. We’re thrilled to be partnering with Mern, Jake, and the Bolto team as they build it.