From Venmo at 1 a.m. to staffing the Super Bowl: How Undergrads unlocked faster growth with Everee
The company that started with a Craigslist ad
Thomas Mumford and his co-founder weren’t trying to build a staffing empire. They were two industrial engineering students at Clemson trying to make rent in a small college town where the only options were bagging groceries or watching your friends drink at the bar until 2 a.m. while you worked.
So in 2016 they posted a Craigslist ad: “Two college kids will move stuff around.” Nobody called about furniture. The phone kept ringing for U-Haul loads. They’d stumbled onto something real: the need for reliable, on-demand moving labor.
That ad became Undergrads. What started in Clemson expanded to 14 markets across the Southeast and Texas. Then the pandemic hit, and instead of collapsing, the business pivoted. Catering companies desperate for staffing started calling. Undergrads launched a hospitality division, and promptly staffed Michael Jordan’s birthday party, the President’s Cup, Formula 1 in Austin, the Super Bowl in Las Vegas, and the Kentucky Derby.
Today Undergrads runs two divisions, moving labor and premium event staffing, with a lean team of 12 globally distributed people, over 2,000 active student workers, and a growing stack of AI-powered automations.
But before any of that could happen, they had to fix payroll.
Staying up until 1 a.m. to run Venmo
In the early days, payroll at Undergrads looked like most scrappy startups: Apple Notes, then Google Sheets, then a tangle of Zapier automations connecting Google Calendar and Square to track hours and trigger payments.
And for payouts? Venmo.
That worked, until it really, really didn’t.
“We had multiple Venmo accounts and we were hitting our max payout every single rolling seven days,” says Thomas Mumford, Co-founder and CEO. “We had to stay up until 1 a.m. to run payroll.”
They graduated to Square, which helped until the user base hit around 500 workers and the platform would stop loading everyone. Then came Stripe, which solved scale but introduced a new problem: the onboarding experience was built for developers, not for college students trying to sign up for a first shift.
Worse, Stripe required Undergrads to pre-fund the account. That meant tying up working capital before a single job was completed. For a business built on deploying labor fast and funding operations from incoming revenue, that cash flow drag was a real constraint on growth.
They evaluated roughly 20 payout providers. Most couldn’t do what they needed. Then they found Everee.
Two unlocks that changed how the business runs
Thomas points to two things that made Everee different from everything else they evaluated.
The first was onboarding timing. With every other provider, workers had to set up their payment account before they could take a job. For Undergrads, that was a conversion killer, especially at high-profile events.
“If you’re going to work the Super Bowl and you don’t really know my company, and I say, “Hey, put in your bank information when you set up your account” — people think , ‘This is a scam. You’re gonna take my money,’” says Thomas. “Everee actually allowed us to push that hurdle until after the service is completed.”
That shift, requiring account setup only after a job is finished not before, removed a major drop-off point in the worker funnel. Students signed up, worked the shift, then set up payment. Simple.
The second unlock was cash flow. Stripe’s 3–4 day settlement lag meant Undergrads was constantly floating money, paying for ads and operations before client payments cleared. Everee pulls funding in real time.
“Stripe pre-funds the account, which kept our cash flow locked up. It kills you when you’re moving and you need that money,” says Thomas. “Everee unlocked the cash flow for us to pre-fund the ads, get the money when the move is completed, and then pay the movers after the fact.”
Real-time funding meant Undergrads could run campaigns, take on jobs, and pay workers in a tighter, faster cycle instead of waiting on settlement windows to replenish their operating account.
Why getting paid fast matters, straight from someone who knows
Undergrads isn’t just a staffing platform. Its whole identity is built around empowering college students. Thomas has interviewed hundreds of them. He knows exactly why same-day pay matters to this demographic, and he’s refreshingly direct about it.
Some are stretched thin and need the money immediately for rent, food, or books. Some want to book a spring break trip.
“A lot of them don’t have the money, so they’re looking at zero dollars or negative dollars in their bank account,” says Thomas. “They’re not able to go out or hang out with their friends, not able to book the spring break trip. So they’re working to immediately fund those things. Instantly paying them is paying off that wish list.”
That’s why Undergrads plans to roll out same-day and next-day payouts, something Everee’s API makes straightforward to build.
“There’s no reason that we need to hold payment other than it helps cash flow,” says Thomas. “But that’s a feature that is well worth the offer to students. And your API allows for it, so it makes it pretty easy.”
Faster pay is also a competitive advantage in a market where staffing companies fish from the same labor pool. At a premium event like the Players Championship, every staffing line has the same workers rotating across employers, going wherever pays a dollar more. Undergrads differentiates on brand and on caliber of workers.
What scale actually looks like
Undergrads staffed 400 students at the 2022 President’s Cup. That contract led to F1 in Austin, which led to the Super Bowl in Las Vegas, which led to the Live Golf contract, the Kentucky Derby, and the PGA. They sent 500 workers to the 2025 Players Championship.
On the moving side, there are now roughly 2,000 active workers across 12 markets, with plans to expand to 15–20 markets this year and 250 markets by August 2028. The hospitality division is run by two people and almost entirely automated.
That’s not an accident. Thomas made the deliberate call to delete their custom-built software and rebuild on modern tooling. AI handles sales cycle friction. Automations do what used to require a full team.
“With AI, what that can do to a service-based business — we’re gonna essentially turn into an e-com business,” says Thomas. “You can service a lot more customers with that same white-glove experience at high volume. You’re not really held back anymore.”
Payroll infrastructure is part of that stack. When you’re running thousands of worker payouts across multiple markets and event types, the payout provider isn’t background noise, it’s a core piece of the operating system.
The reason they’ll never expand beyond students
Plenty of people have suggested Undergrads go after a broader labor market. More supply, more demand, more revenue. Thomas has heard the pitch. He’s not interested.
“We were going through a really hard time at one point, and knowing that all these students are really counting on you is what pushed us through,” says Thomas. “Some of them were going to drop out and our jobs helped them just get through the school year. They made a couple hundred extra bucks, but that paid for the books, paid for the food, made them feel a little more comfortable. That’s what makes a difference in their lives.”
That purpose shapes everything at Undergrads: the brand, the hiring, the differentiation. At a premium event, you can spot the Undergrads line from across the room. That’s the kind of brand clarity that makes a payroll platform choice matter, too.
Paying students quickly, reliably, and without friction isn’t just operationally smart. For Undergrads, it’s consistent with what the company was built to do.
The short version
Undergrads needed a payout partner that could handle a large, gig-style worker base without requiring account setup before the first shift, without tying up operating capital for days, and with an API flexible enough to support same-day pay as the business scaled. They found Everee.
If your payout provider is the bottleneck, for cash flow, worker conversion, or payment speed, it might be worth seeing how Everee fits.
