Everywhere

Larry Talley spent 15 years building enterprise software for hotels, where he invented a text messaging system to drive upsells and customer engagement—sending real SMS messages to hotel guests through actual phone numbers paired with bots that could escalate to humans. When he exited that business, he saw an obvious gap: what if he applied that same conversational texting model to payments? "I like to think that everywhere was born based on the mindset of applying a text message conversation to a payment transaction to ultimately help companies collect faster." The company was founded in 2018.

In the early days, Talley was a solo founder with one desk in Austin, Texas. He made a strategic decision to hire another software engineer to replace himself as the primary coder, freeing him to focus on HR and team building. He hired friends from his network—a move he acknowledges could have "lead to a disaster" but actually worked out well because "these people were really loyal." The initial product suffered from feature bloat. Talley had built an app, a text messaging system, and a payments platform all at once. When he pitched VCs, the feedback was blunt: "You have too much. These are great ideas." The investors' eyes lit up for only one thing: the payments engine. Talley made the hard call to shelf his other ideas and focus entirely on what would become the MVP—a "pay by mobile" solution that assigned merchants a unique mobile number in their local area code, paired with a personalized bot that could handle payment questions or escalate to a human.

The breakthrough came during COVID. Talley pivoted to healthcare, recognizing that nobody wanted to sit on hold or wait 30 days for paper statements to be processed. He struck a deal with Visa and began working with paper statement companies to deliver billing notifications via text instead. The pandemic created perfect conditions: paper shortages, contactless payment demand, and shifting money movement. Healthcare providers loved it—patients could text questions, get immediate responses, and pay on their own time without the friction of phone calls or holds. "Everyone can do and operate on their own time. And that's really was the beauty about the text message."

Talley then took it further, partnering with Visa again to implement network tokenization—the same technology behind Google Pay and Apple Pay. A phone number, he realized, offered two-factor authentication built-in. He could pull a trust score by cross-referencing the phone number against identity data, making fraud detection more secure than plastic cards with chips.

The expansion was rapid. He didn't try to knock on a thousand merchant doors. Instead, he targeted one door with a thousand customers behind it—larger software companies, banks, and enterprise platforms. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, KeyBank, Visa, Discover, and T-Mobile all became customers. By allowing white-label implementation, Everywhere's technology spread like wildfire without the company needing to build direct relationships with every end merchant. Today, the company serves over 10,000 customers and 18,000+ users.

Everywhere reached 10 million ARR and is on track to exceed $25 million in revenue this year. The company has grown to 57 employees with plans to add 40 more within six months. Talley has matured the organization by replacing early-stage hires with experienced executives who've scaled companies before—a painful but necessary transition. Culture remains central; he emphasizes hiring people he'd want to grab a beer with and building a "family" environment where people actually enjoy coming to the office together.

The next frontier is global expansion. Since major customers like Bank of America and Visa operate worldwide, Everywhere is hiring internationally to keep pace and expand into new geographic markets and sectors.