Rise: Hire, Onboard, and Pay Borderless Teams in Fiat or Crypto

Hiring the right specialist is no longer a geography problem. Marketing, product, and technology teams routinely find contractors in Brazil, full-time engineers in Europe, and freelance operators across Asia. The hard part starts after the offer: local employment rules, worker classification, tax forms, and getting paid in a currency that actually works for the person doing the work.

Rise is built for that gap. The Beachwood, Ohio company gives startups and growing teams a single platform to hire, onboard, and pay employees, contractors, and freelancers in 190+ countries, in local currency, stablecoins, or crypto, without standing up a local entity for every new hire.

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What Rise Does

Rise combines global payroll, contractor payments, and employment infrastructure in one dashboard. You can fund payroll in U.S. dollars or stablecoins such as USDC and USDT, then let people withdraw in the way that fits them: a local bank account, a stablecoin, or cryptocurrency. The company says it has processed 900,000+ payouts across 90+ local currencies and 100+ cryptocurrencies.

That hybrid model is the point. Finance teams don’t have to run one process for bank wires and another for on-chain payments, and workers aren’t stuck waiting on correspondent banks or weekend cutoffs. Rise is designed to move payouts the same day, including on Sundays, and to let you edit payroll up until payday.

Hire Employees and Contractors Without Local Entities

Most teams don’t need every hiring model on day one, but they do outgrow a payments-only tool. Rise separates the jobs clearly:

• Employer of Record: Rise employs full-time talent in 90+ countries on your behalf, covering locally compliant agreements, payroll taxes, filings, and country-appropriate benefits, including crypto-friendly 401(k) options in the United States. You find the person; Rise handles the local employment stack. Pricing is $399 per employee per month.
• Agent of Record: For independent contractors, Rise can contract directly with the worker and subcontract their services to you. That structure is meant to reduce misclassification exposure, and it includes agreements, background checks, NDAs, classification checks, and year-end forms such as 1099s. Coverage extends to 190+ countries, at $299 per contractor per month.
• Global Contractor Pay: If you want compliant contractor onboarding and flexible payouts without the full agent relationship, this plan covers self-onboarding, compliance checks, global contracts, annual tax reporting, and fiat or crypto payments for $49 per contractor per month. Rise offers discounts for startups and non-profits.
• Direct U.S. Payroll: For teams in all 50 states, Rise calculates, files, and pays federal, state, and local payroll taxes, supports compliant new-hire onboarding, and issues year-end W-2s and 1099s. You can run unlimited payrolls each month, and pay people in USD, stablecoin, or crypto. Plans start at $49.

Onboarding is built as a connected flow rather than a pile of tools: invitation, identity verification, agreement signing, and payout setup. Rise also provides 24/7 human support, with live help in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and additional languages, which matters when your team isn’t working on a U.S. clock.

Turn Payday Into a Hiring Advantage

Global hiring offers fall apart when payday is slow, expensive, or inflexible. Rise treats payment choice as part of the employer brand:

• Daily Pay: Wages can go out automatically at the end of each workday, without manual requests, fees, or loans.
• Split Pay: People can split a paycheck between local currency, stablecoins, and cryptocurrency.
• Rise Earn: Companies, employees, and contractors can put idle USDC to work inside the platform, without running their own DeFi workflow. Funds can be allocated, tracked, and redeemed from the same dashboard, then withdrawn in local currency or stablecoins.

See How Rise Payroll Works

Identity, Advisors, and an AI Layer

Rise has also been extending the platform beyond the core payroll run. Rise ID is a reusable digital identity for global workers. It automates KYC, KYB, and AML checks, can hold work history and documents, and doubles as a payroll-ready wallet, so people don’t have to resubmit the same paperwork for every contract.

Rise Pro, rolling out in November 2026, is aimed at accounting and advisory firms. It is a free dashboard for managing every client’s U.S. and global workforce in one place, with access controls for the firm’s accountants. Firms can set each client’s per-worker price, let Rise handle invoicing, and keep the margin. Preferred pricing is available through the Rise Advisor Program, with tiers based on the number of active clients.

Rise MCP connects a Rise account to AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Grok, and DeepSeek through the MCP standard. Team admins can ask for payroll funding gaps, journals, payment obligations, PTO balances, or new-hire lists in plain language. Read-only questions are answered directly. Anything that changes data, such as approving leave or adding a bonus, requires confirmation in the browser, and employees only see their own information.

On the compliance side, Rise is SOC 2 certified and GDPR compliant, protects accounts with multi-factor authentication and encryption, and operates as a registered U.S. Money Service Business through Rise Works Inc. and Rise Works Licensing LLC.

Rise Pricing

Published pricing is usage-based rather than a single platform fee:

• Global Contractor Pay is $49 per contractor per month, with discounts for startups and non-profits.
• Direct U.S. Payroll starts at $49 and includes tax calculations, filings, unlimited payroll runs, and year-end forms.
• Agent of Record is $299 per contractor per month.
• Employer of Record is $399 per employee per month.
• Rise Pro is free for advisory firms, with preferred pricing as client volume grows.

Custom plans are available if your mix of employees, contractors, and countries doesn’t fit a single tier. If you’re stitching together wires, local entities, and spreadsheets to pay a borderless team, Rise is worth a look: one place to hire, onboard, and pay people the way they actually want to get paid.

Book a Rise Demo