This Founder raised $600M+ to help workers get paid faster

Manav: Welcome to today's episode of Emerging Founders with Manav. Today's guest is Atif Siddiqi. He's the founder and CEO of Branch, a workplace platform that's changing the way workers and businesses manage pay. His journey to launching Branch began during his time at Idealab, an accelerator based in Pasadena — he saw firsthand the challenges workers faced with outdated payment systems, and that insight led him to create a platform to solve it. Since then, Branch has grown to an insane level — they've raised more than $600 million in funding, have a really big team, and I'm really excited to have you on the show. This is my first time talking to someone who's scaled a company to this level.

Atif: Oh, thank you for having me.

Manav: How have you been — it's been a long journey, eight or nine years. I think a lot about how there's this kind of ADHD with entrepreneurs nowadays, always jumping around, switching ideas. What was the thing that made Branch stick?

Atif: It has been a long journey. One of the biggest things I've learned is that it's definitely a marathon, not a sprint. Part of that is really taking pride in the journey and the learning along the way. For us, what continues to motivate us is the impact we're having on everyday working American lives — almost 70% of the American economy works in an hourly job, a tipped job, or as an independent contractor, and seeing the financial challenges we're solving for that group is really what keeps us going.

Manav: Was the original idea focused on solving a problem for the gig economy, for freelancers — what was the inception?

Atif: The original idea was actually focused more on hourly workers. The mission behind Branch has always been the same — how do you help these workers grow financially — but the product early on looked pretty different from where we are today. We started by helping them earn more income at their current place of employment. As we did that, we kept peeling back the layers on why they were looking for more income in the first place, and that's when we discovered the deeper financial challenges this group faces — income volatility, since their schedules fluctuate, so their income fluctuates too. We were already sitting on a lot of the underlying data — how much someone worked, when they showed up, how much they earned — and we realized that if we could accelerate payment of that already-earned income, that was a real way to help them financially, because they'd be less financially stressed.

Manav: Branch has so many features now, so many different solutions — do you remember the first moment you felt, "okay, we have product-market fit"?

Atif: I think it was really just watching the growth rates and demand. If you go back to the original scheduling software, it was a mobile B2B layer on top of an existing workforce management system. When we launched the fintech piece — what's now called earned wage access, giving W-2 employees a portion of income they've already earned, ahead of the normal pay cycle — within about two months we surpassed all the growth we'd seen over two years selling that original B2B SaaS product. That's when we knew: okay, this is something, the growth rates here are incredible, people keep asking for it, now we just need to figure out how to scale it into a real business.

Manav: How does the Uber integration work right now — if I'm an Uber driver using the Branch app, do I get paid the same day I drive?

Atif: You onboard as a new Uber driver and you have the option to say, "I want to get paid right after my ride is complete," opting into the Uber Pro Card, which is a white-label version of Branch that we power for Uber. Once you opt in, as soon as your ride is completed, those funds get deposited instantly into your Uber Pro Card, which you can go use right away. There are also some unique rewards baked in for drivers — up to 5% cash back on gas, which is meaningful for them since it's a frequent expense. It's become a great way for drivers to not only get paid faster, but also earn rewards, keep building their balance, and keep taking more rides.

Manav: How big is Branch right now — are you guys international? What's the next stage for the app?

Atif: We're not international yet, just domestic in the US. We're about 240 employees, with thousands of businesses active on the platform. We've taken a really focused, verticalized approach to go-to-market over the past couple of years — focusing on specific verticals let us go deep and really understand our ideal customer profile. Right now we're in hospitality — largely restaurants — healthcare, largely healthcare staffing, and business services, which covers more general-purpose staffing and call centers. Taking that vertical approach has let us grow really methodically. We've now validated some new verticals heading into this year, like construction, another space with a big problem around antiquated payout methods — so we're working on expanding into new verticals from there.

Manav: I think you guys should look at manufacturing — with all the tariffs being put on international manufacturing, there's going to be a real boom in domestic manufacturing.

Atif: Wow, that's incredible, actually.

Manav: I want to go back to the beginning a bit — I worked at an accelerator myself, and it was such a fun environment to be around people, hearing new ideas every day. I noticed on Idealab's website that Branch is listed as their number one portfolio company, which is pretty cool. What was that experience like, being around other founders like yourself?

Atif: It was really exciting. I was a solo founder, so having other founders around going through similar early-stage challenges mattered a lot. I was also fortunate to work directly with Bill Gross, Idealab's founder, and to understand how he thought about really early company formation, before you even have a product in the market. That was fundamental — it gave me a deep understanding of the need to actually validate what you're building. We still do that today — before we put any engineering or product resources into something, we make sure we're validating that we're building the right thing, at the right time, for our customers.

Manav: I think now's a good moment to talk about the future, since AI has obviously been around for a couple years now — I've gone down the DeepSeek and OpenAI rabbit hole, AI agents, OpenAI just launched this new "Tasks" feature, I'm pretty deep into all of it. How do you see the future of SaaS businesses? Are you guys building out your own AI tools too?

Atif: I think first, it's true that you can build products now really, really quickly because of AI, with a lot less people and a lot less capital — which is exciting for customers and consumers generally, more choice, and better products rising to the top. But ultimately, at the end of the day, it still comes down to solving customer problems. The customer doesn't care what model you're using — they just know they have a problem, and this software layer helps them solve it. You've got compliance teams, fraud teams, support teams, banking operations people handling dispute charges — there's a huge operational component, and we're leveraging AI to help with a lot of that, effectively 10x-ing our team's capacity so we can handle more volume and process more on the operations side.

Manav: One quick thing I want to ask, not part of the rapid-fire round — were your parents always encouraging about you being an entrepreneur? Mine are always super supportive, always telling me, "Manav, go start something" — I ask because with South Asian parents specifically, it can go either way.

Atif: No, I was very, very fortunate to have really supportive parents in anything I did. I remember when I was 11 or 12, I wanted to be an exchange student in Japan — a pretty big undertaking, and I ended up spending a summer there. I had to convince them, but I think experiences like that, and their support, really shaped who I am today. No matter what I did — starting Branch, going back to school for my MBA — they were always really supportive.

Manav: I think some of us are just lucky to have that kind of support. Next question — what purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months?

Atif: I'd probably say some of the premium subscriptions to AI models, honestly. I've tried all of them, I love playing around with new tools, and when I look at my actual usage, it just keeps increasing over time as the models keep getting better. I'd say any of them, whether it's a ChatGPT subscription, Gemini Deep Research, they're all genuinely great.

Manav: It's incredible — there's that joke about only talking to two or three people a day, and one of them being ChatGPT. It's so true, people just use it as a permanent fixture now. How has an apparent failure set you up for later success — something that felt like a failure in the moment but turned out to be a lesson in disguise?

Atif: I'm not sure I'd call it an outright failure, but even just the pivot itself was genuinely challenging. We were still generating good SaaS revenue as a B2B mobile SaaS product at the time, and making that shift felt almost like flying the plane all the way down to the ground while you're still assembling it, hoping you put it together correctly so you can take off again. That was challenging — we had to right-size the team for the new direction, go through all of that. But ultimately I think it was the right move, and we were able to persevere through it.

Manav: How can people find you, and how can people learn more about what you're building? I'm guessing Branch is always looking to hire more people.

Atif: You can go to our website, branchapp.com, to find everything about us. We're also on all the socials, including me personally — it's Atif Siddiqi on X. Happy to engage with anybody looking for a new opportunity — we are hiring, so take a look.

Manav: All right guys, thank you for watching — I'll post links to Atif's LinkedIn, Twitter, and Branch's website in the show notes and description. Thank you for watching another episode of Emerging Founders with Manav — this was a lot of fun, I'll see you in the next episode.