With a presence in every province, Nmbr CEO Simon Bourgeois says it’s time to think internationally.
The average person will probably go their whole life without uttering the words “payroll” and “super cool” in the same sentence, but that’s why Simon Bourgeois is a self-proclaimed payroll nerd.
“I know it’s hard to [make payroll] seem cool, but man, I think what we’re doing right now is super cool.”
Bourgeois is the CEO of Toronto-based embedded payroll company Nmbr. Since the FinTech startup’s founding three years ago, it has been helping 25 Canadian companies build bespoke payroll offerings. Now, fresh off of a new funding round from existing investors, and with a presence in every province, Bourgeois is permitting himself to think internationally.
“I really think that we’re changing this industry in a meaningful way right now in Canada, and that we’re in a position to potentially do that for the entire world,” Bourgeois told BetaKit last week in an exclusive interview.
The change Bourgeois speaks of is competition. The way the former Humi CEO sees it, before starting Nmbr, there were fewer than 10 “credible” payroll software companies in Canada. He said there were about 700 such firms in the US, meaning Canadian businesses had very little choice in payroll providers in comparison.
“If you were just to look at this law of averages, and you look at our country’s size, we deserve to have 70 … good payroll software companies in Canada, and there aren’t,” Bourgeois said.
Since raising seed funding in 2024, Nmbr has signed on 25 partner companies to create their own payroll offering, bringing the national number of payroll companies up to about halfway of Bourgeois’s optimal ratio.
While payroll is typically handled by standalone software or external providers, Nmbr’s main product is an application programming interface (API) that allows software providers to embed payroll directly into their platform. In addition to moving money, Nmbr works with its partners to iron out what unique functionality or reporting features they might require.
“Payroll happens to be this one extremely complicated product that many companies are trying to manage,” Bourgeois said. “We have an advantage in that it is our entire business, and we are a deeply experienced team.”
Some of Nmbr’s partners include banks like ATB Financial or HR software companies like Collage, but it’s those building for edge cases that excite Bourgeois the most. This includes dental staffing platform Fairly, which used Nmbr to build a compliant payroll offering for dental clinics to properly classify and pay temporary workers as employees.
“This is not even close to what some people think of as traditional payroll,” Bourgeois said. “We’re enabling really powerful, unique, niche products to come to market that serve areas that were underserved previously or just really not served at all.”
Maybe not niche, but definitely underserved, is the Québec market, which Nmbr entered for the first time last year through a previously unannounced partnership with HR software platform Folks. Bourgeois said many software companies simply don’t serve Québec because it comes with a language barrier and “local complexities,” like its unique regulations and government entities for money service and payroll businesses.
“There was a real investment to bring that market to life,” Bourgeois said.
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To be exact, Nmbr raised $5.5 million CAD in the latter half of 2025 from its existing investor base—Luge Capital, Panache Ventures, Golden Ventures, and Motivate Venture Capital—to make the push. The investment brought Nmbr’s total funding to approximately $13 million CAD.
With the most difficult Canadian market now under control, Nmbr is now thinking internationally. Nothing is set in stone yet, but Bourgeois is insistent that he believes Nmbr is well-positioned to enhance global payroll markets the same way it is in Canada right now. He said the company has been “keying in” on international markets for more than a year and sees opportunities everywhere, but it still needs a few more months to choose its first destination.
“Everybody who works gets paid, and so we have an opportunity to really impact every worker in Canada,” Bourgeois said. “If you were to take that a step further … we have an opportunity to impact every person who works in the world.”
“I know it’s hard to write about payroll and make it seem cool, but man, I think what we’re doing right now is super cool,” Bourgeois added.
Feature image courtesy Nmbr.
