By Brett Barlow, CEO of Everee
When I found out Everee had been named one of Fast Company’s 2026 Most Innovative Companies, my first reaction was to think about all the workers this is really about.
The worker who finishes a 12-hour nursing shift and has to wait until next Friday to access the money she already earned. The delivery driver who worked all weekend but can’t cover Monday’s gas until his biweekly direct deposit clears. The staffing agency that wants to compete for talent but is stuck offering the same two-week pay cycle everyone else does.
Those are the people we built Everee for. And this recognition tells me the industry is finally catching up to what they deserve.
Payroll has been broken for a long time.
Traditional pay cycles weren’t designed to serve workers. They were a workaround, invented when paper checks, manual tax calculations, and batch processing made delays unavoidable. That world doesn’t exist anymore. Yet an entire industry kept operating as if it did, and millions of workers paid the price. Literally.
When someone works all week but doesn’t get paid until the following Friday, they’re not just waiting. They’re absorbing financial stress that compounds over time: overdraft fees, payday loans, impossible choices between bills. It’s a timing mismatch baked into a system that was never really designed with workers in mind.
We started Everee to fix that at the root, not with a band-aid.
What makes us different
We recently launched the industry’s first pay-cycle-free payroll system, one that calculates gross-to-net taxes and deductions in real time, processes payroll based on actual work events rather than arbitrary calendar dates, and keeps everything fully compliant across all 50 states. A healthcare staffing platform can now pay nurses the day after their shift ends. An event staffing company can run payroll Monday morning and have everyone paid before lunch. A taxi fleet can pay a driver before the passenger even exits.
We also launched branded pay card infrastructure, giving companies the ability to issue Visa-powered pay cards under their own brand. Workers get instant access to earnings within minutes of completing a job, including weekends and holidays when traditional banking is closed. And we deepened our integration ecosystem with leading workforce and staffing platforms. For the businesses that want to pay workers faster but are waiting on their own clients to pay them first, we built Flex Credit, payroll financing that removes the cash flow problem from the equation entirely.
We processed nearly $2 billion in payments in 2025. We have 550K workers on our platform across all 50 states. But the numbers I keep coming back to are different: 61% of clinicians say they’d choose one healthcare staffing agency over another specifically for same-day pay capability. 84% of gig drivers say payment speed is extremely important when deciding which platform to work for.
Pay speed isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s become a fundamental expectation, and for a lot of workers, a financial lifeline.
What this recognition is about
Being named to Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list is validation that the problem we’ve been solving is real, the approach is right, and the timing matters. The payroll industry is starting to move. Competitors who once dismissed daily pay, or were OK with bolting on earned wage access apps to solve it, are now scrambling. That’s not a threat–it’s a signal that we’ve helped shift what the market expects.
But we’ve already moved beyond same-day pay. Eliminating the pay cycle entirely is just the beginning of what payroll can look like when you rebuild it from the ground up.
I’m grateful to our customers who took a chance on a different way of doing things. To our partners who helped us build an ecosystem. And to the Everee team, who wakes up every day thinking about how to make this work better for the people on the other end of every paycheck.
We’re just getting started.
Brett Barlow is the CEO of Everee, a payroll platform that enables businesses to pay any worker, W-2 or 1099 — the same day they work.