Valeria turned restaurant accounting into AI payroll for frontline workers (interview)

Valeria runs payroll and workforce operations for high-turnover industries like hospitality, retail, logistics and services.

$2M led by Venture Friends, with Fortino Capital and 10k Ventures; previously €1.7M (€1.5M equity plus €200K public funding).

Pau Laporte, Carlos Saiz and Sergio Morales Bonet — veterans of operations at Uber, Getir and Glovo — started Valeria as an accounting solution for restaurants; Laporte says they very quickly realized payroll was the bigger opportunity.

Launched in January 2025, the platform reached more than 100 companies in under a year, resolves 94% of client queries, and grew to 18 employees, mostly engineers and operators, according to Laporte.

High-turnover industries onboard and offboard constantly — exactly what monthly-cycle payroll systems were never designed for.

Government systems without modern APIs kept payroll infrastructure stuck; AI-assisted integration is the new wedge.

Payroll outsources well — nearly every company buys it — so a better engine has a ready market.

The founders felt the problem operationally at Uber, Getir and Glovo scale, up to 2,000 riders.

The first product a founder ships is often just the listening post: the restaurant accounting tool heard where the real pain was — payroll that could not follow operations.

As of February 5, 2026, Valeria had 100-plus customers and 18 employees, and planned to grow the team, deepen automation and expand into additional markets while building cross-border payroll infrastructure.