There’s a company in downtown Toronto where the team comes into the office five days a week, engineers sit within shouting distance of customer support, and problems are solved while they are still fresh.
There’s a good chance you have never heard of it.
Borderless AI is a Toronto-based global employment and payroll technology company helping businesses hire, pay and manage employees around the world. It was recently named one of The Globe and Mail’s Canada’s Top Growing Companies, following 754% revenue growth over three years.
Behind the scenes, it is also building one of the more distinctive workplace cultures emerging from Toronto’s technology sector.
While much of the industry has spent the past several years debating remote work, return-to-office mandates and hybrid schedules, Borderless AI has gone firmly in the opposite direction. Its team works together in person five days a week.
Building a company where people want to be in the room
Borderless AI’s approach to office culture is simple enough: if you want people together, you need to make being together worthwhile.
The company provides fully catered lunch and dinner every day. Teams work in open, collaborative spaces rather than being separated across functions. Leadership works alongside the broader team. Even the meeting rooms are named after Borderless AI customers, a small reminder of who the work is ultimately for. And the office is designed to make it easy for someone in sales, customer support, product or engineering to walk over and solve something together immediately.
It’s a physical reflection of the three values Borderless AI has built its culture around: quality-first, customer obsession and intensity.
Borderless AI operates in an industry where seemingly small operational issues can have very real consequences. Its technology is used to support global hiring, payroll, payments and employment compliance across international markets.
This means a delayed payroll issue goes beyond a software ticket. It can mean an employee waiting for their salary. A compliance question is not something that can always sit unanswered until tomorrow.
That reality has shaped the culture the company is building.
“When you’re managing people’s paychecks and complex international employment requirements, speed isn’t just a convenience. It directly affects trust, security and, in many cases, people’s livelihoods.” says Willson Cross, Co-Founder and CEO of Borderless AI.
“When our customer support team can turn around and speak directly to the developer who built a feature, you can solve in minutes what might otherwise take hours or days. We want to create an environment where incredibly ambitious people can do the best work of their careers together.”
A deliberately high-performance culture
Borderless AI is not trying to build a relaxed version of a traditional office.
The company has assembled talent with experience at organizations including Meta, Amazon, InstaCart, Lyft, Microsoft and Western Union, bringing people accustomed to operating at significant scale into a much smaller and faster-moving environment.
That combination has created a culture where employees are expected to move quickly, take ownership and work across traditional departmental boundaries.
A customer problem can become an engineering conversation immediately. Feedback from a sales call can reach the product team the same afternoon.
Ultimately, the in-office environment is less about where people work, but how quickly information travels.
The advantage of being 10 feet away
Customer-facing teams regularly encounter questions that sit somewhere between technology, payments, employment law and local market rules. Solving them often requires multiple parts of the company. In a distributed environment, that can mean messages, tickets, meetings, handoffs and avoidable delays.
At Borderless AI, the person with the answer may be sitting 10 feet away. That creates faster feedback loops between customers and the people actually building the product.
Engineers hear where users are getting stuck. Product teams see which problems keep coming up. Customer teams can get answers without waiting for another department to come online.
And leadership remains close enough to the day-to-day work to see problems developing in real time.
It is a decidedly old-school idea being applied to a very modern technology company: sometimes the fastest communication tool is still walking over to someone’s desk.
Not every company will want to work this way
Borderless AI’s model will not appeal to everyone, and that’s the point.
The company is intentionally building around people who want the pace, energy and closeness of working alongside an ambitious team every day.
The free meals, downtown office and panoramic views are part of making that environment enjoyable. But the deeper proposition is the opportunity to work somewhere where decisions happen quickly, individual contributions are highly visible and employees have direct access to the people building every part of the company.
As Toronto’s technology ecosystem matures, Borderless AI represents a different version of startup culture than the one that has dominated much of the past several years.
Borderless AI helps companies build and manage distributed teams around the world. Internally, though, it has chosen a very different model: More people in a room solving hard problems together.
From the outside, Borderless AI may still be a company many Torontonians have never heard of.Inside 1 University Avenue, it is trying to become one of the hardest-working teams in the city.