Fintech · Dublin
Northgate
Payroll and compliance for teams spread across borders.
- Stage
- Series B
- Founded
- Founded 2019
- First invested
- We invested 2020
- Team
- 189 people
- Board
- Board seat
- Total raised
- $62M
- Current stage
- Series B
- Team
- 189
- Founded
- 2019
What they build
The product, in plain terms
Northgate builds payroll and compliance for teams spread across borders. The company started in Dublin in 2019. We backed it at seed and have worked with the team through Series B.
- 01
Ledger infrastructure a finance team can reconcile without exporting anything to a spreadsheet.
- 02
Direct connections to the banks and processors that matter in each market, maintained in house rather than resold.
- 03
Controls, audit trails, and approvals designed with a controller in the room, not bolted on after the first enterprise deal.
Where it stands
Numbers the team watches
Reported by the company at its most recent board meeting. We publish what founders are comfortable publishing and nothing more.
- Annualised volume
- $29M
- Reconciliation accuracy
- 94%
- Median settlement
- 2 weeks
Why we invested
The note from the first meeting
“We met Northgate in 2020, back when the product had to be correct before it was impressive, which slowed everyone else down. We had been looking for a team in this category for about a year. They were the first ones who talked about the customer more than the technology.”
- Rebuilt pricing twice and doubled contract value both times.
- Opened a second market within a year of its seed round.
- Reached default-alive economics before raising a priced round.
Founders
Who is building it
Both founders were in the room the day we wrote the check, and both still run the company.
Idris Adeyemi
Co-founder and CEO
Came out of an operating role rather than a lab, and it shows in the roadmap.
Oksana Sokolov
Co-founder and CTO
Left a research group to find out whether the work survived contact with customers.
Timeline
How it has gone
The version we would give another investor, including the years where nothing looked like progress.
- 2019
Founded
Idris Adeyemi and Oksana Sokolov start Northgate in Dublin around a single wedge: payroll and compliance for teams spread across borders.
- 2020
We invested
We wrote the seed check and took a board seat. Amara Okafor has worked with the team ever since.
- 2021
Paid customers
Contracts replaced pilots, and the company stopped selling a roadmap and started selling a product.
- 2022
Series B round
Raised at $480M, led by an investor we introduced during diligence. We took our full pro rata.
- 2026
Where it stands
189 people, selling in more markets than it started in, still run by the two people who wrote the first version.
Alongside us
Co-investors
We share rounds with people we would want on our own cap table.
- Boldstart
- Lux Capital
- Matrix
- Uncork Capital
Working here
Open roles
Northgate is hiring in these areas. Mention us and the note gets to the founders directly.
- Compliance
- Bank partnerships
- Payments engineering
Building something next to Northgate?
We are usually early to a category and happy to be early again. Send us the short version.