Solar Staff, an international payment and task management solution for companies and contractors, has launched in the United States.
Solar Staff automates interaction between 700,000 independent contractors and more than 1,600 businesses from 45 markets including SPLAT, SumSub, Atomic Wallet and Adguard.
The company was founded using only the founders’ money, with an estimated $1.5million invested at the launch and revenues topping $950 thousand in July 2022. The company targets startups and small- to medium-sized businesses and provides them with talent onboarding, task management, security checks, payment availability for 190+ countries and territories, copyright transactions and tax payments for freelancers from different jurisdictions.
Solar Staff complies with all countries KYC requirements, financial and legal sanctions and does not work with not internationally recognised territories.
Solar Staff was founded by Pavel Shynkarenko, an experienced entrepreneur with over 20 years practice in legal and financial services, and a team of over 75 professionals from six countries with backgrounds in the UN, UniCredit Bank and RSM International. Company development, finance, IT, tax, client support and marketing departments are based in Cyprus, and a local team of experts provides client onboarding and legal support services from the New York office.
“With the launch of Solar Staff in the US market, we aim to create a bridge between businesses from sustainable economies and independent contractors from emerging markets. Our solution will allow US based companies to work with skilled freelancers from emerging regions as fast and simple as with local ones,” notes Pavel Shynkarenko, cofounder and CEO at Solar Staff.
“Also our clients will reduce their costs of crossboarding transactions, and increase their team effectiveness with a complex of tools that fully automate paperwork and settlements with freelance forces. We aim to triple our revenue and double the number of independent contractors in 2023,” Shynkarenko concluded.
Circa 5000 tasks have been processed through Solar Staff from US based companies in 2022. They primarily hire freelancers from Russia and Belarus for IT, project-management and analytics tasks. In total US companies paid over $2.9million to cross-border freelancers via Solar Staff in 2022.
80 per cent of medium and large businesses who work with freelancers on a permanent basis via Solar Staff use the service for over two years with a large number of companies using it for over five years. Client commissions vary from 3.5 to six per cent for the US businesses. The commission depends on the number of tasks managed via Solar Staff, and freelancers use the service at no cost to them.
Service provides dispute mediation for both client and contractor rights compliance with only one out of a thousand debates getting out of moderation unresolved. According to MGI’s projections, the global freelance economy will hit $1.3trillion annually by 2025, with freelancers making up over 50 per cent of the US workforce by 2027.
Francis Bignell
