I'm Arup Maity. I run three companies.
BlastAsia (PH, founded 2000) — software product engineering. Xamun Technologies (UK + PH) — an AI operating system for mid-market businesses. Steer Platform Pte. Ltd. (Singapore, 2019) — this one.
Across these three businesses, I have employees in Manila, contractors in Singapore and London, and a board that meets across four time zones. Payroll is in PHP and SGD and GBP. Some of my team are billable on client work; others are internal. I file 2316s in January and IR8As in March.
I tried every payroll tool that PH professional services firms typically use. Sprout. JustPayroll. Salarium (briefly, before it imploded in 2023). I tried generic global tools — Deel, Remote, Rippling. None of them handled my actual setup.
The PH tools couldn't handle foreign contractors. The global tools didn't speak PH compliance. None of them treated the timesheet as the source of truth for both payroll AND client billing — which is a structural problem, not a feature gap, because it forces everything downstream into reconciliation hell.
So I built it.
We started by running BlastAsia's payroll on Steer Workforce. Then Xamun. Then we opened it up to other firms. We dogfood publicly because trust matters more than marketing claims.
I'm based in Manila. We're incorporated in Singapore. We host PH customer data in PH infrastructure. We expand across ASEAN because the same problem exists everywhere.
If you run a project-driven professional services firm and you're tired of three tools that don't agree on the same number, let me show you what we built.
— Arup