Tomer London

Tomer London
Nationality	Israeli-American
Occupation	Technology entrepreneur, software executive
Known for	Co-founder of Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll)
Website	[[gusto.com gusto.com] Official site]

Tomer London is an Israeli-American technology entrepreneur and software executive who co-founded Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll), a cloud-based payroll, benefits, and human resource management platform serving small and medium-sized businesses in the United States. Alongside co-founders Josh Reeves and Edward Kim, London launched the company in 2012 with the goal of simplifying payroll processing and helping small businesses better support their employees. What began as a payroll-focused startup backed by one of Y Combinator's largest seed rounds grew into a comprehensive platform that generated more than $500 million in revenue in its 2023 fiscal year and employed approximately 2,400 people. As Chief Product Officer at Gusto, London has played a central role in shaping the company's product strategy, overseeing the expansion from a single payroll service into a multi-faceted platform encompassing benefits administration, HR tools, and financial services for small businesses. His work has focused on addressing the operational challenges faced by small business owners, particularly around payroll management, employee onboarding, insurance, and regulatory compliance.

Career

Founding of ZenPayroll

In 2012, Tomer London, along with Josh Reeves and Edward Kim, founded ZenPayroll, a cloud-based payroll service designed to modernize payroll processing for small businesses. The company emerged from Y Combinator and secured what was reported at the time as one of Y Combinator's largest seed funding rounds, raising $6.1 million from a group of prominent technology executives and investors, including the CEOs of Yammer, Box, Yelp, and Dropbox. Google and Salesforce were also among the early backers.

The founding team identified payroll as a significant pain point for small businesses, an area where existing solutions from legacy providers were often cumbersome, opaque, and poorly suited to the needs of smaller employers. London and his co-founders set out to build a modern, cloud-native platform that would make payroll processing simpler, more transparent, and more accessible for businesses that lacked dedicated HR departments.

The company launched initially in California and quickly expanded to additional states. By June 2013, ZenPayroll had added support for contract workers and was preparing to expand its services to Florida, Texas, and other states. By August 2013, the platform had crossed $100 million in payroll processed annually and had expanded its service to Texas, Florida, and Washington state.

Growth and Series A Funding

In February 2014, ZenPayroll raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by General Catalyst and Kleiner Perkins, valuing the company at more than $100 million. This round of funding enabled the company to accelerate its growth, expand its engineering team, and develop additional features for small business customers.

Throughout 2014, London and his co-founders pursued a strategy of building an integrated back-office platform for small businesses. In September 2014, ZenPayroll launched an API and announced integrations with approximately a dozen other cloud-based business systems, aiming to unite the various software tools that small businesses relied upon for their operations. The New York Times noted at the time that ZenPayroll was giving small businesses access to the kinds of technology tools that had previously been available only to larger companies.

In December 2014, ZenPayroll introduced a feature allowing companies to match their employees' charitable donations through the payroll system, reflecting the company's broader mission to use the employer-employee relationship as a vehicle for positive outcomes beyond basic compensation.

Rebranding to Gusto

In September 2015, ZenPayroll changed its name to Gusto, a rebrand that accompanied a significant expansion of the company's product offerings beyond payroll. With the name change, the company began offering health insurance and workers' compensation services, signaling a transition from a payroll-only tool to a broader HR and benefits platform. London, as the company's Chief Product Officer, was instrumental in guiding this product expansion, which aimed to consolidate multiple business functions—payroll, benefits, onboarding, and compliance—into a single integrated platform.

The rebranding also coincided with plans for geographic expansion. In 2015, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper announced that Gusto planned to hire up to 1,750 people in the Denver area, signaling the company's growth trajectory beyond its San Francisco headquarters.

Unicorn Valuation and Continued Expansion

By 2015, Gusto had achieved a valuation of $1 billion in a new funding round, making it a so-called "unicorn" company. In August 2016, the company announced it would be raising prices for its payroll service starting October 1, 2016, as it continued to invest in expanding its feature set and infrastructure.

The company's valuation continued to rise in subsequent years. By 2020, Gusto was valued at $3.8 billion, and the platform had enabled over $1 billion in COVID-19 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans to be approved for small businesses during the early stages of the pandemic. The PPP loan facilitation represented a significant moment for the company, as it demonstrated the platform's capacity to serve as critical financial infrastructure for small businesses during a period of economic crisis. London and his co-founders leveraged the company's existing payroll data and relationships with small businesses to expedite the loan application process at a time when many small business owners were struggling to access federal relief funds.

Product Evolution and Financial Milestones

Under London's product leadership, Gusto continued to expand its service offerings throughout the 2020s. The platform evolved to include a comprehensive suite of tools encompassing payroll processing, benefits administration, HR management, time tracking, hiring and onboarding, and financial services.

In November 2025, Gusto announced a partnership with Guideline to launch Gusto 401(k), a retirement savings product that integrated retirement plan administration with the company's existing payroll, money management, and HR tools. The product was designed to make it possible for small businesses and their employees to access retirement benefits that had traditionally been available primarily at larger companies.

By the end of fiscal year 2023, Gusto had generated more than $500 million in revenue and achieved cash flow positive status. The Fortune report on the company's financial performance noted that the co-founders attributed their approach to business-building to values they described as "mom-approved," suggesting a focus on long-term sustainability and ethical practices rather than aggressive growth at all costs.

Thought Leadership and Advocacy

London has been active in discussions about entrepreneurship policy and the challenges facing small businesses and solopreneurs. In a March 2025 article published in Fast Company, he identified three policy areas to support the next wave of entrepreneurship, noting that solopreneurs—entrepreneurs with no employees—face many of the same challenges as traditional small business owners, including issues related to funding, healthcare, taxes, and compliance.

In a February 2025 appearance on the a16z Live podcast, London discussed his perspective on building mission-critical software for small businesses. He emphasized that payroll remains a significant operational challenge for small business owners, that selecting the right initial customer base is essential for driving growth, and that building trust is fundamental when developing software that handles sensitive financial and employee data.

Personal Life

Tomer London is of Israeli origin. Details about his personal life beyond his professional career are not extensively documented in public sources. He is based in the United States, where he has lived and worked since co-founding ZenPayroll in 2012.

Legacy

Tomer London's co-founding of Gusto has contributed to a shift in how small businesses in the United States manage payroll, benefits, and human resources. Prior to the emergence of cloud-based platforms like Gusto, small businesses often relied on legacy payroll providers or manual processes that were costly, time-consuming, and prone to error. The platform London helped build has served as a model for how technology companies can address the back-office needs of small and medium-sized businesses through integrated, cloud-native software.

The company's growth from a Y Combinator startup processing its first payrolls in California to a platform generating over $500 million in annual revenue reflects the scale of the market opportunity that London and his co-founders identified. Gusto's role during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it facilitated over $1 billion in PPP loans for small businesses, further demonstrated the platform's significance as financial infrastructure for the small business ecosystem.

London's emphasis on the importance of trust in mission-critical software—particularly software that handles payroll and employee data—has informed Gusto's product development philosophy. His advocacy for policy reforms to support solopreneurs and small business owners reflects a broader engagement with the structural challenges facing entrepreneurship in the United States.