Privately Held Software Companies to Watch: August 2026 (Baird)

Summary

• Baird presents its list of Baird Disruptors for August 2026, featuring influential and disruptive privately held software companies.p.2
• Deel offers global HR and payroll software supporting companies across 150 countries on a single platform.p.7
• G-P delivers global HR and payroll software allowing businesses to manage employees across over 180 countries.p.8
• VensureHR processes over $19 billion in payroll while supporting more than 508,000 worksite employees.p.9
• Vestwell serves 750,000 employers and 2.55 million savers, representing $56 billion in assets on its workplace retirement platform.p.9
• Identity Digital operates as a domain name registrar with a portfolio of nearly 300 TLDs supporting approximately 25M domains.p.13

Key insights

1. Baird's Technology & Services team publishes the Baird Disruptors list to highlight leading private software firms across security, HR, enterprise AI, data, and vertical software sectors.p.2
2. Financial wellness platform DailyPay provides access to earned wages in the U.S. by funding accessed wages and receiving reimbursement during normal payroll processing.p.7
3. ONE@Work, backed by Walmart and Ribbit Capital, provides on-demand pay and financial wellness tools to employees in the U.S.p.8
4. Remote provides global HR and payroll software to help organizations manage workforce operations in over 200 countries.p.9
5. Mistral AI is a France-based startup creating open-weight large language models for text, code, and image applications.p.14
6. UserTesting was taken private in 2022 and subsequently merged with UserZoom to deliver unified human insights.p.17
7. Data integration providers Fivetran and dbt Labs merged in 2025 to streamline automated data centralization and transformation.p.19