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Central, which has built an AI agent to automate payroll and HR tasks, raised $8.6 million in seed funding, CEO Josh Wymer tells Axios exclusively.

Why it matters: Founders are ditching dashboards and checklists for conversational tools that can automate back-office work.

Zoom in: First Round led the seed round and was joined by Y Combinator, Ritual Capital, Multimodal Ventures, Alumni Ventures and Surgepoint Capital.

How it works: Central bundles back-office functions like payroll, benefits and compliance into an AI agent that lives within Slack.  

Founders and employees can message the bot to change salaries, pull insurance cards or register in new states, among other things.

If the AI agent ever gets stuck, tasks are routed to a human support team.

"Whatever you ask the agent to do, it will end in a confirmation prompt. Everything's reviewed by a human," Wymer says. But, he adds, "our next step is agents reviewing other agents' work, and eventually, you get to the point where you can make these fully autonomous." 

Between the lines: Central relies on embedded fintech providers like Check, Guideline and Routable for some of its plumbing.

By leveraging third-party APIs, the startup was able to quickly spin up a bundled HR and back-office solution with an AI layer on top.

"Two things gave us this opportunity: AI and the maturity of these payment platforms," Wymer says. "In prior eras, you had to build a server farm; now you can just use AWS."

State of play: By charging $50 per employee per month — plus a $100 platform fee — Central isn't trying to undercut the competition or be the lowest-cost option.

It's betting that startups will pay a little more for a Slack-native "teammate" that handles onboarding, payroll and compliance.

"Founders don't start companies to get buried in payroll forms or state compliance filings," Wymer says. "We believed that founders would pay more if they could reduce the amount of work."

By the numbers: The startup says it has already processed more than $75 million in payroll for hundreds of high-growth companies.

Customers include Wordware, Wyndly, Poseidon Aerospace and Bitesight.

As a Y Combinator alum, it signed up its first 80 customers through the YC network, but now about 70% of all new clients are non-YC companies, Wymer says.

Exclusive: Central raises $8.6M for automated HR chatbot

Founders are ditching dashboards and checklists for conversational tools.

Illustration of a robot head wearing a headset on the body of a human in a business suit. 

Central, which has built an AI agent to automate payroll and HR tasks, raised $8.6 million in seed funding, CEO Josh Wymer tells Axios exclusively.Why it matters: Founders are ditching dashboards and checklists for conversational tools that can automate back-office work.

Exclusive: Central raises $8.6M for automated HR chatbot

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