Andrew Brown

Co-Founder & CEO Check

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Andrew Brown is co-founder and chief executive of Check, which sells payroll as infrastructure rather than as a product. Its customers are not employers but software platforms — a restaurant management system, a field-service tool, a vertical HR product — who want to offer payroll to their own users without building it. Payroll is uniquely hostile to build: tax filing in every US jurisdiction, money movement, and a compliance surface where a mistake means a penalty rather than a bug report. Check absorbs that and lets the platform put its own name on the result. Brown arrived at the idea after selling his first company, the e-book subscription service Oyster, to Google in 2015, and has said explicitly that he wanted the second one to be something he could work on for a decade rather than something to sell quickly. Check has raised about $119 million, Stripe leading its two largest rounds, and now underpins payroll for more than sixty platform partners.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Oyster in 2012 as chief technology officer and sold it to Google in September 2015.
• Moved with the founding team to Google, leading Google Play Books operations in New York until 2019.
• Co-founded Check in 2019 and built in stealth for several years before launching publicly.
• Raised approximately $119 million — $1 million seed and $8 million Series A from Bedrock, a $35 million Series B led by Stripe with Thrive Capital, and a $75 million Series C led by Stripe in February 2022.
• Built payroll infrastructure now used by more than 65 platform partners, serving over 50,000 businesses, paying more than a million employees and processing upwards of $15 billion annually.
• Named to Business Insider’s 30 Under 30 in Enterprise Technology in 2013 and 2014, and to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2015.

Professional Journey

Brown’s first company was a consumer bet with a clean thesis and a hard market. Oyster, founded in New York in 2012 with Eric Stromberg and Willem Van Lancker, was an all-you-can-read e-book subscription — the “Netflix for books” comparison was unavoidable and the company did not avoid it. Brown was the chief technology officer. The service launched in September 2013 at $9.95 a month with more than a million titles across iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, NOOK and the web, and it raised well: $3 million from Founders Fund in October 2012 and $14 million led by Highland Capital Partners in January 2014.

The economics were the problem, as they are for every subscription service whose content costs are per-read rather than fixed. In September 2015 Google acquired Oyster, on undisclosed terms estimated in the $20-30 million range, and shut the consumer service down in early 2016. The founders went to Google to run Google Play Books operations out of New York. This was an acquihire in structure but a substantive posting in practice, and Brown stayed four years — long enough to see how a book business works at the scale of a platform rather than a startup, and long enough to have wanted something different when he left.

What he wanted, by his own account, was durability. The lesson he took from Oyster was not that the idea had been wrong but that he had built something optimised for an outcome rather than for a decade of work, and he set out deliberately to find a problem he would still be interested in after ten years. The specific idea for Check arrived from a conversation rather than from a search: a prospective partner, an HR platform, explained just how difficult it was to build payroll into their product. That is a classic infrastructure signal — a capability everybody in a category needs, that none of them can justify building, and that nobody is selling as a component.

Check was founded in 2019, with a co-founder from the Oyster years, and then did something unusual for a venture-backed company: it stayed quiet. Brown spent several years in stealth, concentrating on the initial product and a small number of early platform partnerships rather than on launch publicity. For payroll infrastructure this is defensible rather than indulgent — the product has to be right in every state before it can be right anywhere, and a partner who embeds your payroll is betting their own customer relationship on it. Bedrock funded the early years with a $1 million seed in 2019 and an $8 million Series A.

The company emerged publicly alongside a $35 million Series B led by Stripe with Thrive Capital, its first platform partners between them already serving more than 100,000 small businesses. Stripe as lead investor is a signal worth reading: Stripe’s own business is the same shape — a capability sold to developers as infrastructure rather than to end users as a product — and its participation legitimised Check to exactly the vertical SaaS companies it needed as customers. Stripe led again in February 2022 with a $75 million Series C, taking total capital raised to roughly $119 million.

Check today describes itself as the platform on which developers build payroll products, and Brown has framed the current phase around what partners do with it — more than sixty-five platforms using embedded payroll to offer all-in-one solutions to their own customers, rather than treating payroll as a referral to somebody else’s product. The company serves more than 50,000 businesses, pays over a million employees and moves upwards of $15 billion a year, and operates its money transmission through Check Payments LLC, NMLS #2103307. On the question of what comes next, Brown has been consistent since founding it: this is the company he does not intend to sell.

Education

Duke University

Computer Science and Economics

The degree type is not specified in any source reviewed and is deliberately omitted rather than guessed; the Duke attendance itself was not independently re-verified in this pass.