Acquiring Via to Accelerate our Local Vision for Global Teams

I’m thrilled to share that Justworks has entered into a merger agreement to acquire Via to accelerate our international solutions for small businesses. You can check out the official announcement here.

The landscape for talent has changed dramatically in recent years. Businesses have gotten more creative and open to what it means to be a team, and how and where work gets done. 

Naturally, we’ve heard this from our customers. 1 in 4 are already working with international team members, and many more expect to explore leveraging global talent in the future. 

Yet, we often hear that they and other small businesses haven’t found an ideal provider when it comes to going international. They want a partner, not just a product. They need help maintaining a local, “one-team” touch. And many don’t know where to start.

Last month, we launched international contractor payments—directly addressing the needs of customers looking to seamlessly hire, onboard, and pay global talent in 30 countries. We also shared that Justworks’ native Employer of Record (EOR) solution is set to launch later this year. 

We are acquiring Via to supercharge our efforts. By bringing on a strong team of operators and developers who are experienced in EOR, led by two impressive and visionary leaders in co-founders Maite and Itziar Diez-Canedo, we aspire to give every small business's international teammates the exceptional Justworks experience they deserve. 

Hire Local, Grow Global

In 2017, sisters and Co-CEOs, Maite and Itziar founded Via. Their initial aim was straightforward: connect businesses with exceptional talent around the world. 

But after getting off the ground—and seeing first-hand that the true pain their customers faced was not just with international recruitment, but everything that came after it—Via’s mission began to evolve. It wasn’t just about creating connections with the right talent. It was about the international talent experience. The real challenge businesses faced was the intricate process following that initial connection—how do you seamlessly onboard someone from a different country, ensure they receive proper benefits, and set them up compliantly?

As Maite and Itziar explored the landscape, a gap stood out. The world was filled with providers that approached international hiring with a one-size-fits-all mindset. This had been inadequate because the nuances of employment, benefits, and compliance vary greatly from one nation to the next, which often left international teams with a second-class experience. Via’s epiphany was this: the key to truly unlocking global talent for their customers wasn't just about connection, but about building a hyper-local EOR experience.

So, beginning in Latin America, where their familiarity with the market ran deep, Maite and Itziar crafted something different. Via is the world’s only local-first international employment platform. Local-first means helping businesses build international teams with hands-on HR, tax, legal, and accounting support. It means understanding the importance of employees’ local preferences and access to culturally relevant benefits. It means prioritizing country-specific compliance.

Since those early days, Via has thoughtfully invested in expanding its global presence. All the while, Maite and Itziar have stayed focused on their customers, prioritized getting the important stuff right, and created an exceptional product and servicing experience. 

Via’s approach to growth very much resonates with how we thought about Justworks' own expansion in the early years. That is, we listened to the customers we had in New York. We learned how to deliver an exceptional experience for them—and then we never wavered from those principles as we took on the incremental complexity of new markets. This decision continues to pay dividends today. Just ask anyone who uses Justworks!

Currently, Via has built proprietary local infrastructure in 12 countries. In the months ahead, as we integrate our teams, we’ll be developing a shared geographic expansion strategy for addressing our customers’ international employment needs.

Finding a Mission-Aligned Company

At Justworks, small business is our business. Our approach has always been driven by listening to our customer’s evolving needs and building software from the ground up to create an experience that entrepreneurs and their teams love. 

After spending time with dozens of companies working on international employment, we often left meetings feeling that the only way to provide the Justworks experience to employees internationally was to build it ourselves. Other companies had either prioritized growth at the sake of compliance, neglected service and support, or were culturally misaligned with us.

In getting to know Maite and Itziar, however, things felt very different. It was a breath of fresh air to see that there was another player in the space who shared our desire to build something new and unique for customers. With Via, we found not only a platform that aligns seamlessly with our product vision but also a team that resonates deeply with our overarching mission and values. This acquisition will strengthen our existing international team, while also enabling us to help more types of small businesses grow with confidence and ensure that every team member, no matter where they live or work, feels valued and supported.

We envision a future where small businesses can seamlessly manage and take care of their people across the globe with the same simplicity and sense of partnership they get from Justworks already. Together with Via, that’s exactly what we’re going to build.