How Collate Scaled from 3 to 55 Employees with Every

Key takeaways

• How can you scale fast as a startup while minimizing any road bumps?
• For hypergrowth startup Collate, the enterprise AI platform for global life science companies, partnering with Every’s AI-native HR platform to automate their back-office processes meant they could scale rapidly and ensure their startup ran smoothly.
• The result? The startup scaled from 3 to 55 employees in just 18 months and raised $125 million in capital.

Two strategic HR decisions help set up Collate for success

Silicon Valley-based Collate was founded by successful serial entrepreneur and CEO Surbhi Sarna and features a founding technical bench hailing from the likes of NVIDIA, Amazon AGI, Google, AWS, Meta, Stanford, and MIT.

Surbhi and her team built Collate’s AI-powered platform to help life sciences companies automate the workflows and documentation across the full breadth of their work, from early research and R&D through development, clinical trials, and commercialization. Ultimately, Collate helps life sciences teams harness AI to bring life-saving innovations to patients sooner.

With a $30 million seed round in early 2025, Collate was poised for a growth spurt. But before hyperscaling her startup, Surbhi, as CEO and founder, made two important early strategic decisions when it came to HR:

• By partnering with Every’s AI-native HR and finance platform to automate back-office functions, she built the infrastructure that let Collate scale rapidly and effectively.
• Surbhi also invested early in recruitment, hiring two full-time recruiters to ensure Collate hired the right people from the start.

These two strategic HR decisions helped set Collate on its current trajectory of success, closing a second investment round of $95 million just eighteen months later.

Based on Collate’s experience, here are 5 tips for founders on how to scale your startup the right way.

1. Automate HR so you can scale fast

In the last 18 months, Collate has grown rapidly, scaling from 3 to 55 employees. But this kind of hyperscaling would not have been possible without Every handling Collate’s HR back office.

“Every has been a huge benefit during our recent growth spurt. With Every handling everything from employee onboarding and benefits to payroll, taxes, and HR compliance, Collate scaled rapidly without any HR road bumps,” said Alexis Linton, Workplace Operations Lead at Collate. “In fact, I don’t think we could have hyperscaled without Every.”

Collate was also strategic about who it hired. By focusing on revenue-generating hires like product and engineering roles, the startup closed a second investment round of $95 million by June 2026. And with Every handling HR as they scaled, Collate was able to avoid hiring an additional senior HR manager, saving around $200,000 annually.

2. Turn onboarding into a 5-minute process

Before its growth spurt, Collate ensured it had the right HR, payroll, and compliance processes in place to keep pace. With two recruiters bringing in new employees, Collate partnered with Every to automate and streamline onboarding.

Once new hires sign an offer letter, they receive an invitation to log in to the Every platform, and from there it’s smooth sailing. Every handles all the key onboarding steps, including conducting background checks, uploading I-9 forms, collecting bank account details for payroll, and enrolling new hires in Collate’s healthcare benefit options.

“Every has been a real high point in terms of employee onboarding. The Every platform’s UI is very intuitive and easy to use. I don’t get any questions, which saves me a lot of time. For example, I just onboarded a new employee on Monday, and by the time I met with him, he had done all the onboarding steps in about five minutes,” said Alexis.

3. Make it smooth sailing for employee payroll, taxes, and benefits, too

The Every platform also handles the headaches of payroll, taxes, and employee benefits for Collate. In addition to running biweekly payroll, Every also makes it easy to add relocation stipends or signing bonuses. Every also withholds all the appropriate federal and local taxes for Collate’s employees.

Setting up employee benefits and open enrollment was also a smooth and seamless process with Every.

“I met with Every’s in-house Benefits Broker, and he made recommendations on what our benefit package should look like at our startup stage. Then we set it up in our Every portal so employees could enroll or opt out. What’s really great is we made Every our broker of record, so now if we have any issue or would like to make any policy changes, Every can take care of it directly for us instead of going through a middleman,” explained Alexis.

4. Ensure you stay compliant with labor laws as you grow

As startups grow and add new employees, that’s a good thing, but larger employee counts also trigger labor-law thresholds startups must meet. As Collate grew, Every ensured they stayed compliant every step of the way.

“HR pain points are ‘good’ pain points to have because that means you’re growing. At Collate, we grew so fast and hit labor law thresholds that required us to provide certain benefits to our employees. It was very helpful to have Every by our side to flag when we crossed these thresholds in terms of our employee size and to help us stay compliant,” said Alexis.

For example, in San Francisco, startups must provide commuter benefits when they reach 20 employees. Every flagged this law to Collate and helped identify the right commuter benefits for the startup.

5. Build a back-office stack all in one place

Finally, as you scale, build a back-office stack that’s all in one place. Instead of separate systems for every function, use an all-in-one solution like Every to cover your HR, payroll, compliance, finance, taxes, and accounting needs. Every’s AI-native HR and Finance platform was built specifically for founders by founders, providing a startup’s entire system of record in one place, powered by superintelligence.

“What I love most about the Every team is that they are a startup too; they’re growing right along with us. We voice our needs, they listen, and then roll out new features to support us. They are true partners and come through for us,” summarized Alexis.

To learn more about how you can scale your back office with Every, you can get started here.