Nami Baral

Founder & CEO Niural

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Nami Baral is the founder and chief executive of Niural, a platform that handles the administrative machinery of employing people across borders — payroll, professional employer organisation services, benefits, tax compliance and vendor payments — in the United States and more than 150 other countries, from one system. The company’s distinguishing claim is architectural rather than geographic: Baral argues that existing global payroll providers are systems of record, essentially databases wrapped in service teams, and that the category needs to become a system of intelligence. Niural’s answer is an AI agent it calls EMMA, positioned as a coworker rather than a feature, sitting on top of proprietary tax engines and integrated payments infrastructure. Baral is a repeat founder: her previous company, Harvest Platform, used AI to claw back consumer bank fees and was acquired by Acorns in 2021, and before that she spent five years at Twitter, ending as Head of Product Partnerships. Niural raised a $31m Series A in June 2025 led by Marathon Management Partners, on the back of reported 700 per cent annual recurring revenue growth.

Career Highlights

• Founded Niural in 2022 and leads it as chief executive, with Nabin Banskota as co-founder and president.
• Raised a $31m Series A announced 26 June 2025, led by Marathon Management Partners with M13, Inspired Capital and Newform Capital participating, and Gokul Rajaram joining the board.
• Reported 700 per cent annual recurring revenue growth in the year preceding that round.
• Built a customer base including Polygon Labs, Tensor, Mob Entertainment, Slingshot AI and Karate.com.
• Shipped EMMA, an AI agent for payroll, global compliance and payment operations, alongside proprietary tax engines and integrated payments infrastructure.
• Previously founded Harvest Platform, a consumer fintech that automatically recovered bank fees and reduced consumer debt, acquired by Acorns on 1 March 2021.
• Spent roughly five years at Twitter, ultimately as Head of Product Partnerships.
• Began her career in investment banking, working on mergers and acquisitions.

Professional Journey

Baral grew up in Nepal and arrived at Harvard as a pre-med student, a plan she did not stick to; she graduated with a degree in economics and mathematics and went into investment banking, working on mergers and acquisitions. She then moved to a fast-growing startup that Twitter acquired, and stayed at Twitter for about five years, rising to Head of Product Partnerships. That role sat at the junction of product and business development — deciding which external platforms and services Twitter’s product would integrate with — and gave her the operational exposure to platform economics that both her subsequent companies depend on.

She left to found Harvest Platform, a consumer fintech built on a simple and unusually concrete premise: American consumers pay large sums in avoidable bank fees and rarely dispute them, because doing so is tedious and the individual amounts are small. Harvest automated the negotiation, using AI to identify recoverable fees and pursue refunds on the customer’s behalf, and extended into debt reduction. Acorns, the consumer investing app, acquired the company on 1 March 2021.

In 2022 Baral founded Niural with Nabin Banskota, a former chief financial officer who serves as president and brings the global financial operations, risk and compliance side. The problem they identified was one that had grown sharply with distributed work: a mid-sized company hiring in several countries has to reconcile separate payroll systems, employer-of-record arrangements, benefits regimes, tax jurisdictions and payment rails, usually through a patchwork of vendors and spreadsheets, and the finance and people functions end up duplicating each other’s work. Niural consolidates that into one platform covering the United States and over 150 countries, combining PEO services, payroll, benefits, compliance and vendor payments.

What differentiates the company commercially is its insistence on owning the hard infrastructure rather than reselling it — its own tax engines and its own payments plumbing — and, since the generative AI wave, on layering agentic capability over the top. EMMA is presented as an AI coworker that performs payroll and compliance operations rather than merely reporting on them, which is the sense in which Baral describes converting a system of record into a system of intelligence.

The commercial trajectory has been steep. M13 backed the company at pre-seed and led its seed round, and in June 2025 Niural announced a $31m Series A led by Marathon Management Partners, with M13, Inspired Capital and Newform Capital participating and Gokul Rajaram taking a board seat. The company reported 700 per cent annual recurring revenue growth over the preceding year, with customers concentrated among fast-growing technology and crypto companies including Polygon Labs, Tensor, Slingshot AI and Mob Entertainment.

Education

Harvard University

Bachelor’s degree, Economics and Mathematics