ZayZoon: How Tate Hackert Went From Craigslist Loans to a $68M-Funded Earned Wage Access Fintech

TL;DR: ZayZoon is an earned wage access (EWA) platform that partners with payroll companies to let employees draw down pay they've already earned before payday, instead of turning to payday loans or overdraft fees. It was co-founded by Tate Hackert (President), Darcy Tuer (CEO) and Jamie Ha (CFO), and, as Hackert shared on the show, launched in market at the beginning of 2016 after roughly three years of building the idea. The company's first $18 million came almost entirely from Calgary-based angels and family offices before it ever took venture capital. It has since raised a $15 million Series A (March 2020), a $34.5 million Series B (September 2023), and a $15 million Series B extension (March 2024), for $68 million raised in total as of that extension. On the show, which aired in December 2024, Hackert declined to give an exact revenue figure but confirmed it was "closer to the 100 million than the 10 million" — the episode itself is titled around the company doing "$50M+ ARR." Headcount grew from about 20 employees in 2020 to 200 by the time of the interview, per Hackert. As of November 2025, ZayZoon ranked #66 on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 with 1,487% three-year revenue growth. The story starts, unusually, with a teenager lending his own commercial-fishing money to strangers on Craigslist. Listen to the full interview on The Product Market Fit Show.

What does ZayZoon do?

ZayZoon sits between a company's payroll system and its employees. Most people are paid every two weeks, but they've earned their wages continuously — day by day, shift by shift. ZayZoon lets an employee log in, usually through their payroll or time-and-attendance portal, and pull out wages they've already worked for but haven't been paid yet. On payday, ZayZoon is repaid automatically out of that paycheck, plus a small fee. Hackert is precise about the distinction from a payday loan:

"Advance, not loan." — Tate Hackert, ZayZoon

Because the money was already earned, ZayZoon isn't extending new credit — it's accelerating cash flow that already belongs to the employee. That's also why its risk is far lower than a payday lender's: repayment comes directly out of payroll.

The company calls the category "earned wage access" (EWA), and Hackert is only half-joking about his role in creating it:

"I will die on the hill that I invented earned wage access." — Tate Hackert, ZayZoon

He admits others were circling the same idea at the same time, but maintains ZayZoon was first to build it on a real payroll integration rather than as a standalone lending product.

The go-to-market is channel-based: ZayZoon sells through payroll companies, who make the product available to employers, who make it available to employees. Hackert put the price at "$0 to $5" per advance, down from roughly $7.50 at launch — already about half the roughly $25 a comparable payday loan cost, as he shared on the show.

Key stat: ZayZoon reports 300+ enrolled employers as of 2026, concentrated in retail, hospitality and healthcare — hourly, shift-based workforces where paycheck-to-paycheck cash-flow gaps are most acute.

Who founded ZayZoon?

The origin story predates the company by close to a decade. Hackert grew up in the commercial fishing industry on Vancouver Island. At 16 — around 2005 or 2006, he said on the show — he did a second mortgage for a family acquaintance who'd just been through a divorce and couldn't get approved by a bank. He got the principal back a year later, with interest, and it clicked. From there he went straight to Craigslist, posting an ad offering money, and started underwriting strangers by feel — no credit checks, often no collateral, just reading people over coffee at Starbucks and Tim Hortons.

"And so a lot of it was just pure trust. And I did over quarter million dollars of these loans from the age of call it 16, 17 to about 23." — Tate Hackert, ZayZoon

What he noticed became ZayZoon's thesis: people asking for $1,000-$5,000 usually had steady paychecks — he'd seen their pay stubs — but couldn't get that from a bank, so they ended up at payday lenders or on Craigslist. He traced the high cost of payday loans to three things: brick-and-mortar overhead, outdated data and collections, and default risk subsidized by everyone else.

The fix crystallized in an almost accidental moment at a lake in Victoria, listening to a friend's dad on speakerphone complain about giving an employee a cash advance and quietly charging fees on it. Hackert realized the employer, not just the employee, was the channel — and going one layer up, through the payroll company that already had the data on hours worked, would make underwriting nearly free.

He connected with Casper Wong, a Toronto fintech founder (Finance It, formerly CommunityLend), by cold-messaging him everywhere he could. That led, after Hackert moved to Calgary, to an introduction to Darcy Tuer, a local tech operator who became ZayZoon's co-founder and CEO. A third co-founder, Jamie Ha, joined later as CFO.

ZayZoon's own company materials describe it as launched in 2017, though Hackert stated on the show that the product went live in market at the beginning of 2016. Either way, the idea itself dates to roughly 2013, when Hackert first pitched Tuer.

How much has ZayZoon raised?

• Pre-Series A: roughly $18 million, "99% Calgary-based, high-net-worth angel investors and family office," no VC money until Series B — as Hackert shared on the show.
• Series A: $15 million, March 2020, led by Prairie Merchant Corporation and Bluesky Equities Ltd. — verified.
• Series B: $34.5 million ($20M debt, $14.5M preferred equity), September 2023, led by Framework Venture Partners, with Export Development Canada and ATB Financial — verified.
• Series B extension: $15 million in equity, March 2024, led by Viola Fintech, with Intuit Ventures, EDC and Framework also participating — verified. Combined, the two tranches brought the round to $49.5 million, for $68 million raised in total as of March 2024.

On the show, Hackert was cagey about a precise revenue number but confirmed the general range when pressed on whether it was closer to $100M than $10M:

"We can say that, yes, we can say that. I don't wanna get too specific on numbers, but yeah." — Tate Hackert, ZayZoon

That's consistent with the episode's own title, framing the company as doing "$50M+ ARR." No new funding round or acquisition has been publicly announced since the March 2024 extension, as of September 2026. What has changed is the growth rate becoming public: ZayZoon ranked #66 on Deloitte's 2025 Technology Fast 500, with 1,487% three-year revenue growth, and made G2's 2026 Best Software Awards (#46, Best Canadian Software) — both verified as of late 2025/early 2026.

The three years that felt like walking around drunk in the dark

The gap between the idea and the payoff was long and, by Hackert's own account, aimless for most of it. After he and Tuer connected, he says:

"In reality, it was walking around drunk in the dark for like three years trying to figure out what we were doing." — Tate Hackert, ZayZoon

Two problems dominated that period. First, there were only so many payroll companies in Canada, and ZayZoon was committed to selling through payroll rather than direct to employers — a bet that meant pivoting the go-to-market to the US in 2018. Second, even once a payroll partner signed on, employee adoption was tiny: only 10-15% of employees ever logged into a self-service payroll portal, so ZayZoon captured a fraction of a fraction of the addressable market. The team kept the lights on with small raises every six months, leaning on early Calgary capital and blind optimism.

The emotional low came in a hotel room in Mexico at the end of 2016, where Hackert — then doing all of ZayZoon's customer support personally — couldn't step away from his phone long enough to go to the beach with his family.

"I went, holy shit, there's something here." — Tate Hackert, ZayZoon

But he separates that personal conviction from the company's actual product-market fit, which he dates later, once every side of the marketplace — payroll company, employer, employee — was pulling the same direction:

"In reality, I think when we look at all the personas of our business, the payroll company, the employer, the employee, we probably didn't experience product market fit truly until the end of 2019." — Tate Hackert, ZayZoon

Then, in February 2020, co-founder Jamie Ha said something Hackert still remembers precisely:

"Guys, I've never felt more confident about this business before. Like we got something now. We got it." — Tate Hackert, ZayZoon, recounting Jamie Ha

Less than a month later, COVID hit and revenue dropped 60-70% almost overnight — shelter-in-place orders meant the hourly, shift-based workers ZayZoon served simply weren't working. The company clawed back and finished 2020 up 60-70% for the year regardless.

Arming the channel: why "set it and forget it" wasn't enough

Even after the product worked, growth stayed stuck for years because ZayZoon had built a hands-off integration — the employer flips a switch, employees can use it, done. Hackert eventually realized that was the problem, not the feature:

"That employer is such a great channel to that employee. And the more attention that you can grab from them, the more that they're willing to then talk about ZayZoon, bring ZayZoon up, include us in their onboarding, not forget about us in their benefits package." — Tate Hackert, ZayZoon

So ZayZoon built a team that physically visits employers, packaged onboarding materials, built recruitment posters ("work here today, get paid today"), and reframed the pitch around the employer's own problems — retention, employees stealing from the register out of financial stress — instead of how seamless the integration was.

Timing mattered too: private equity consolidating the fragmented, owner-operated US payroll industry and pushing modernization; Gusto proving payroll vendors could build delightful, employee-facing products; and COVID normalizing conversations about money at work.

"2020 would have been, yeah, a few million, a few million. And then from 2020 to now, it's been crazy, right? So to put it into perspective, in 2020, we would have been maybe, call it 20 people. We're 200 now." — Tate Hackert, ZayZoon

Key lessons from Tate Hackert's playbook

1. A superior product doesn't sell itself. Hackert once spent two months selling tuna door-to-door in Ontario and sold none — the market didn't value the product the way he did. > "Just because you have a superior product, just because it's better than everyone else's, doesn't mean that people actually care. You need to tell them or show them why they should care." — Tate Hackert, ZayZoon 2. Don't confuse a hands-off integration with a working channel. "Set it and forget it" felt like a strength for years while growth stalled — the fix was arming employers with reasons and materials to sell the product to their own employees. 3. Vanity partnership metrics can hide a broken funnel. Payroll partnerships and employer sign-ups felt like progress while employee conversion sat in the low single digits for years. 4. Product-market fit is a multi-sided test, not a revenue milestone. Hackert felt PMF emotionally in 2016; he says it wasn't actually true across payroll companies, employers, and employees until end of 2019. 5. Concede what you can't win, compete on cost structure instead. ZayZoon couldn't out-capitalize payday loan incumbents, so it built a near-zero-risk repayment model via payroll deduction instead. 6. Intuition is built by doing things, not by planning. > "I think it's just about having this thesis, having the intuition to go for that, and then continually pivoting on your path to that thesis." — Tate Hackert, ZayZoon 7. Early-stage intensity is close to non-negotiable. > "I was like a thousand percent in." — Tate Hackert, ZayZoon

For more Canadian fintech founders taking on incumbents, see Neo Financial's run at Canada's big banks and Martin Basiri's ApplyBoard/Passage on student lending. For payroll and benefits infrastructure, see Thatch's ICHRA platform and Gusto's original ZenPayroll story.

FAQ: ZayZoon

Q: What is ZayZoon? A: An earned wage access (EWA) platform that partners with payroll companies so employees can access wages they've already earned before their scheduled payday, repaid automatically out of their next paycheck.

Q: Who founded ZayZoon? A: Tate Hackert (President), Darcy Tuer (CEO) and Jamie Ha (CFO). Hackert developed the idea after years of informally lending his own money to strangers he met on Craigslist, starting at age 16.

Q: How much funding has ZayZoon raised? A: About $18 million from Calgary angels before any VC, then a $15 million Series A (2020), $34.5 million Series B (2023), and $15 million Series B extension (2024) — $68 million total.

Q: How much revenue does ZayZoon make? A: Hackert declined to give an exact figure but confirmed revenue was "closer to the 100 million than the 10 million" mark as of the December 2024 episode. As of November 2025, ZayZoon reported 1,487% three-year revenue growth on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 (#66).

Q: How many employees does ZayZoon have? A: About 20 in 2020, growing to roughly 200 by the December 2024 interview, per Hackert.

Q: Who are ZayZoon's investors? A: Framework Venture Partners, Viola Fintech, Intuit Ventures, Export Development Canada, ATB Financial, Prairie Merchant Corporation and Bluesky Equities Ltd., plus Calgary-area angels.

Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story

• Tate Hackert, Co-Founder & President of ZayZoon — went from lending his own fishing earnings to strangers on Craigslist at 16, to co-founding one of the first earned wage access companies, to a business that survived a 70% COVID revenue crash and came out growing exponentially.

Listen to the full interview: He made his first loan at 16. Now his fintech startup does $50M+ ARR—here's how.

Listen to the full episode at pmf.show for the complete story.

Last updated: September 2026