How Multiplier Plans to Multiply the GDP of Global Work

When Sagar Khatri started Multiplier, the problem he wanted to solve was painfully concrete.

Before founding the company, Khatri led finance and international expansion for another startup. Expanding into Australia meant waiting roughly ten months to open a bank account. Getting employees onto payroll in Japan took more than a year.

Until the infrastructure existed, the company simply could not hire.

Khatri had also grown up in India before moving abroad in search of better career opportunities. He began thinking about a bigger question: what would happen if people could access those opportunities without having to relocate?

That combination became the foundation for Multiplier.

“How can you get people to do the job that they love without having to leave the people that they love?” Khatri said.

Six years later, his ambition for Multiplier has expanded considerably. He sees global employment becoming an asset class, with hundreds of billions of dollars in wages moving across borders.

Yet the infrastructure supporting those transactions remains highly fragmented.

Multiplier wants to become what Khatri calls the “Global Exchange for Work.”

The harder way to build global employment

The Employer of Record market exploded during the pandemic.

Remote work accelerated. Companies suddenly wanted to hire people in countries where they had no legal entities. Capital poured into startups promising access to workers across 100 or more markets.

There was also a fundamental choice hiding underneath those offerings.

A provider could aggregate local partners and quickly offer broad geographic coverage. Or it could undertake the slower work of building infrastructure directly in each country.

Multiplier chose the second path.

“We never wanted to be a broker,” Khatri said. “We wanted to own the infrastructure.”

Today, Multiplier operates in more than 160 countries. . It has built payroll engines, local insurance offerings and compliance infrastructure across its footprint.

Building that network was cumbersome by design.

Opening an entity in one market might require physical travel. Banking relationships could take months. Local payroll rules needed to be understood and maintained. Regulations continued changing after the infrastructure was built.

That effort creates an important difference in how Multiplier wants to operate.

If payroll goes wrong, the customer should not have to trace the problem through a chain of subcontractors to determine who is responsible.

Multiplier wants to be accountable for the outcome.

Khatri believes there are still years of infrastructure work ahead. Payroll and payments experiences that Americans take for granted can look very different elsewhere. Building a truly global system means continuing to work through those country-level differences one at a time.

“Capital is a drug”

Owning infrastructure across dozens of countries is expensive, especially when you start by building ahead of demand.

Multiplier happened to launch during a period when venture capital was abundant.

Khatri estimates the company raised roughly $70 million to $100 million during its first few rounds in 2021 and 2022. It has not raised another dollar since.

He describes that choice as part of the company’s operating philosophy.

“Capital is a drug,” Khatri said. “Capital finds a way to get spent.”

His concern is cultural as much as financial.

When capital is always available, companies can start solving operational problems with spending. More headcount becomes easier than improving the process. Another acquisition can look more attractive than doing the underlying product work.

Khatri wanted Multiplier to develop a different instinct.

“We will be extremely financially responsible in terms of capital allocation,” he said.

Khatri says Multiplier is now cash flow profitable, with revenue representing a healthy multiple of the capital the company has raised, while still growing rapidly.

That discipline has shaped where Multiplier invests next.

The company keeps putting money into the global employment infrastructure it believes gives it a defensible position.

It is much more reluctant to spend outside of that lane.

Knowing where the swim lane ends

That focus is increasingly visible as HR technology companies expand into adjacent categories.

Global payroll providers have added HRIS capabilities. HCM companies have launched new payroll products. Vendors across the market are trying to capture more of the technology stack.

Multiplier has consciously resisted some of that expansion.

“A lot of our competitors have ventured into a lot of adjacent areas such as HRIS and PEO,” Khatri said. “We have stayed away from that and we will stay away from that.”

Multiplier is concentrating its investment around global payroll and payments, EOR, immigration, contractor management and the supporting infrastructure underneath those services.

Khatri’s reasoning is straightforward.

“We are great at something,” he said. “We have a right to win in those markets.”

That also means accepting that another company may be better positioned to solve the next problem.

Instead of trying to recreate an entire HR technology suite, Multiplier has been developing partnerships with HRIS providers, PEOs and other technology companies.

Its relationship with TriNet offers one example. TriNet customers can access Multiplier capabilities directly through an embedded experience. Multiplier has also developed relationships with other major HR technology providers and expects more embedded partnerships to follow.

That positioning becomes easier when partners know where Multiplier intends to compete.

“We have very clearly stated these are our swim lanes,” Khatri said.

For an industry that often rewards larger product catalogs, there is something refreshing about a company explicitly defining the boundaries of its ambition.

Multiplier wants to go extremely deep in a relatively narrow part of the HR technology stack.

Then it wants to distribute that infrastructure through an ecosystem of companies doing the same thing in their respective categories.

Building the exchange underneath global work

All of those choices connect back to Khatri’s broader thesis about the global economy.

He compares the opportunity in global employment to what happened when commerce became global.

Platforms such as PayPal, eBay, Stripe and Amazon made it easier for buyers in one country to transact with sellers somewhere else. The infrastructure reduced friction, created trust and allowed dramatically more economic activity to take place.

Khatri believes employment is entering a similar period.

Global wages already represent hundreds of billions of dollars in cross-border transactions, according to his estimate. Yet every new employment relationship can still encounter a maze of local payroll requirements, tax systems, banking infrastructure and employment regulations.

Multiplier wants to build a common layer underneath those transactions.

On one side are companies looking for talent.

On the other are people looking for opportunities.

Between them sits the infrastructure required to make the employment relationship actually work.

“Think about creating a layer where countries, talent and companies can interact,” Khatri said, “but at the bottom, owning all the layers of the infra so that the transactions are valid.”

It is an ambitious vision for a company that has become increasingly disciplined about where it spends its time.

The apparent contradiction is what makes Multiplier’s strategy interesting.

The company wants to expand the addressable market for global employment without endlessly expanding its own product surface area. Its bet is that the best way to enable more global work is to keep improving the infrastructure that makes that work possible, then connect it to the rest of the ecosystem.

Near the end of our conversation, the company’s name started to feel especially appropriate.

If global employment infrastructure becomes easier to access, a company does not have to choose talent based primarily on where someone happens to live. Projects that once required a local entity can get started sooner. Companies can tap into expertise that previously sat outside their geographic reach.

Multiply those decisions across thousands of businesses and millions of workers, and the economic impact starts to become much larger than EOR.

That is the market Multiplier is building toward.

Or, as Khatri sees it, the opportunity to multiply the GDP of global work.