About
Built by someone who saw the problem from the inside
The platforms PEOs and other workforce operators depend on were built for vendors, not operators: pricing that climbs with every hire, compliance that flags problems after they happen, and data you never truly own. Stratum was built to fix that.
Founder & CEO
Dillon Flack
Ex-Microsoft · Eight years leading process improvement at a PEO · Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
For eight years my job inside a PEO was finding the waste and defects in how the work got done: data keyed twice, compliance gaps nobody saw until an audit, reconciliations that took a day because the systems didn't talk to each other. Most of it traced back to the software, and the best any process fix could do was work around it.
Stratum applies that Lean Six Sigma discipline to the software itself. Each workflow was designed to remove the steps that add no value and to make the common errors impossible to make, so quality doesn't depend on someone catching a mistake after the fact.
I also watched PEOs pay more for that software with every employee they added. So Stratum runs on infrastructure you own, and an operator’s price steps up only at renewal, never with a single new hire.
What we believe
The principles behind every decision
Owned, not rented
The SaaS model benefits the vendor, not the operator. We built Stratum to be licensed and run on infrastructure you own — because a workforce operator's platform and its clients' data should stay under the operator's control, not a vendor's.
Compliance isn't a checkbox
Most platforms validate transactions against rules. Stratum validates the rules themselves — catching misconfigured leave plans, withholding edge cases, and multi-state worker issues before they become audit findings or client attrition.
Growth shouldn't compound your cost
An operator licenses Stratum on a flat annual subscription by size band, so signing a client or a client hiring someone never moves the price — it steps up only at renewal, once you have really grown into the next band. A business running its own payroll pays per employee instead, at half what hosted platforms charge per head and with no platform fee on top.
Built with operators, not for them
Stratum was designed with input from PEO frontline staff — payroll administrators, HR coordinators, compliance managers. The people who live in this software every day. That shapes what we build and how we build it.
The platform
Eight years of PEO operations, distilled into software
Payroll with 50-state tax coverage, benefits administration, workers' compensation, onboarding and offboarding, leave compliance, a service desk and reporting, in one system. Every module was built to handle the edge cases that generic HR platforms push back to your team as manual exceptions.
PEOs are the core, and the same platform serves ASOs, domestic EORs, staffing agencies and CPA payroll practices, with standalone tools for brokers and for operators staying on their current payroll system.
Explore the platform →Work with us
We’re taking on a small number of founding partners, with founding-partner pricing for the first few.