Embedded-finance provider tracked in the Embedded Finance Index — disclosed by 3 companies across 1 category.
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Founded 2019 as Puzzl, a gig-economy payments startup. When regulation forced Puzzl to reclassify thousands of 1099 contractors as W-2 employees, the founders couldn't find payroll infrastructure that could handle high-volume, dynamic pay — so they built it themselves and pivoted the company to become embedded payroll infrastructure under the Zeal brand. Today Zeal targets workforce platforms (staffing marketplaces, EOR/PEOs, on-demand labor) with an Onboard/Pay/Bill stack, monetizing worker payments via paycards, digital wallets, and instant pay.
Other Payroll providers in the index, by the number of companies that disclose them. A count of public disclosures, not a ranking of the products.
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alt="Ranked #11 of 34 in Payroll — Embedded Finance Index 2026">
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<img src="https://www.embeddedfinanceindex.com/api/badge/zeal/install" width="1" height="1" alt="" style="display:none">3 companies disclose Zeal in their stack in the Embedded Finance Index 2026, including Lawtrades, Lendkey and Workgenius.
Zeal is an embedded-finance provider in Payroll. It ranks #11 of 34 Payroll providers by disclosed buyers.
The most-disclosed Payroll alternatives to Zeal are Gusto Embedded (50 buyers), Check (25 buyers), Remote (16 buyers), Salsa (16 buyers), ADP (9 buyers) and Stripe (8 buyers).
Zeal was founded by Kirti Shenoy and Pranab Krishnan and is founded in 2019, headquartered in San Francisco, CA.
Zeal has raised ~$29.6M in total.
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