Buk: Leveling Up LatAm
9Yards is proud to support Buk in a recent investment alongside our friends at Greenoaks, Base10 and Softbank.
HR software is the core source of truth for a company’s employee data, underpinning critical functions like payroll, benefits, and people management. As we have seen across our own portfolio (Gusto & Remote) and their competitors, HR has quickly become one of the most powerful platform plays. These aren’t just payroll companies anymore — they’re compound companies selling 10 to 15 different, integrated products. This shift, in combination with extreme demand to pay employees digitally, especially in other developed and developing economies, is driving significant growth in companies across this trend.
In Latin America, the HR & payroll market represents north of 300M active employees, ~$3T in wages, and $20B in annual payroll revenues. Despite this, businesses in Latin America have primarily relied on homegrown solutions that don’t scale or imported software that is poorly tailored to local needs. In many ways, the HR & payroll market resembles the US 20+ years ago, before mass disruption from companies like Gusto, Workday, Justworks, Rippling and many more. Current products offer clunky interfaces, opaque pricing, disparate point solutions, and limited connectivity. As we saw with Payroll 1.0 in the US, these offerings were built as services companies, not software companies. As a result, SMBs and modern entrants have been ignored for larger enterprises, which provide the scale necessary to make their unit economics work.
Enter Buk. Buk is building the definitive HRIS suite made in and for Latin America. Buk enables more efficient workflows throughout the full employee lifecycle for more than 5,000 companies in Latin America. The depth of Buk’s product is impressive by global standards, let alone its archaic regional competitors. Buk currently sells over 10 different integrated products alongside payroll including modules that cover hiring, onboarding, training, and benefits. Buk processes payroll across 4 geographies today with their own payroll engines — a feat of operational complexity. Buk is live in Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico with Brazil set to launch over the coming months. We have seen exceptionally strong traction in each new country that Buk launches, meanwhile reaching dominant market share in Chile where the company was born.
Historically, scaled HR and payroll players in other geographies have not focused on Latin America given its unique operationally complexity driven by stringent labor laws that vary drastically country to country. Despite this, The Latin American markets have not seen the level of venture-backed competition in the HR space that has been felt in the US and Europe over the past decade. While the pain point is even more acute in Latin America, HR leaders in the region have continued to be dissatisfied with the price, ease of use, and compatibility of many US-native products that have been evaluated. This has created a tremendous gap that Buk is beginning to fill — a reasonably priced, easy-to-use product that understands the legal and cultural nuances of the region.
Buk was founded by Jaime, Ricardo, Santiago, Teresita and Felipe in 2018. The founders bootstrapped the business to $10M of ARR (a core value that still permeates the entire organization today) before raising their first outside round of funding — a $50M Series A from Greenoaks and Softbank, which would later be followed-on by Base10. We are proud to join this incredible team and strong cap table in the journey to support continued innovation in Latin America.
