Ram Palaniappan is founder and chief executive of EarnIn, the Mountain View, California, company that lets workers take pay they have earned before payday. The idea began with one employee, one bill and a payroll system that could not bend.
A Bill Due Before Payday
He was president of UniRush, the Cincinnati, Ohio, company behind RushCard, one of the first prepaid cards to let users cash paper checks for free. One day an employee mentioned a bill due the next day, with payday more than a week away. "She had already worked for half the week, so I told her we would pay her for the days she had worked that week. But I couldn't make our payroll system do that," he said in a Purdue profile. He paid her himself and settled up when payroll ran, then did the same for others in the office.
A Web Form Becomes a Company
When he moved to California, his former colleagues asked to keep the arrangement, and he built a web form for them. Then strangers started using it. "If you give people access to money they've already earned, life is much simpler. They're paying their bills on time with no more late fees, no more overdrafts, no more payday loans," he said. He founded the company in 2013 as Activehours, later renamed EarnIn. He holds a master's degree in management from Purdue, earned in 2000.
Cash Out and Tips
Its main product, Cash Out, is free at standard speed, with a small fee for transfers within minutes and an optional tip. It is non-recourse: users who do not repay face no collections, only losing access. Skeptics doubted the idea, and he compares them to those who once wanted three flag-bearers around every car. "It's easier sometimes to build technology than to convince people of the need for it."
Venture Backing and Live Pay
EarnIn raised a $125M Series C in December 2018 from Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global and Spark Capital. About one percent of US W-2 workers now use it, and it gives access to $25 billion in wages a year. In July 2025 it launched Live Pay to stream earnings as people work, and users had completed more than one million Live Pay transactions by March 2026.
He once handed a colleague her own wages out of his pocket because the payroll system could not. Millions of workers now do through an app what she did in his office.
