Chesterfield-based Paymerang expands to Wise County

Chesterfield County-based payment and invoice automation company Paymerang LLC will expand its operations to Southwest Virginia, creating 50 jobs in Wise, the company announced Thursday.

The move follows a previous expansion of its Chesterfield County headquarters. In Wise, employees will work in software development, cloud engineering and payment operations.

Paymerang is the second company to join Project Fuse, an economic development initiative developed by the Lonesome Pine Regional Industrial Facilities Authority and InvestSWVA that launched in February. The initiative aims to make Southwest Virginia the location of choice for remote employment and includes Norton and Dickenson, Lee, Scott and Wise counties

The space Paymerang is taking is an expansion of Big Stone Gap’s downtown coworking space in the basement of the former Mutual Pharmacy building. Paymerang has been in discussions about the expansion for 14 months.

Paymerang CEO Nasser Chanda said he got to know Wise because his daughters went to the University of Virginia at Wise for a year. No incentives were provided for the project, and Chanda said the company wanted to invest in the area.

“We need access to great talent,” he said. “We saw that here and said, ‘Let’s put a portion of what we’re creating here.'”

He also sees potential business opportunities in the region, where the town government of Big Stone Gap is already a client.

“We are fully committed to an expansion strategy that includes a distributed workforce, because it enables us to sustain our on-site operations in Chesterfield County while benefiting from an expanded team location to bolster business continuity. Southwest Virginia is the perfect location for us to test and refine this strategy, and we are thrilled to be part of the region’s economic story,” Chanda said in a statement.

The 50 jobs being created will fit into three categories, Chanda said: operations, software development and cloud engineering. He expects to be competitive in all three.

Aldrich Capital Partners invested in Paymerang in 2018 and it has grown from 27 to 200 employees since then.

“Four years ago, we invested $26 million in Paymerang, our largest investment in a Virginia company at that time, and last year, we invested another $10 million,” Mirza Baig, managing partner of Aldrich Capital Partners, said in a statement. “We are most pleased that both Paymerang and eHealth Technologies, also a member of our portfolio, are finding success in business expansion to the Southwest Virginia region. As the entrepreneur behind the entrepreneurs, Aldrich Capital Partners is delighted to help grow companies like Paymerang, to the benefit of all stakeholders, including our friends and neighbors in Virginia’s Southwest.”

Will Payne, who leads InvestSWVA, said Paymerang’s expansion signifies traction in establishing the region as a haven for companies expanding their workforces in rural locations. Paymerang “validates the model and will inspire other companies to root here, too,” he wrote in an email.

Paymerang is using a distributed workforce model in its expanded space to draw talent not just in Wise but from all over the region, and plans for the coworking space to be a hub for that.

The Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission previously awarded the town of Big Stone Gap a $250,263 grant in 2019 to develop the town’s coworking space in what was the Mutual Pharmacy Building.

“Paymerang joins a constellation of companies that sees the strengths of building a presence in rural America,” State Sen. Todd Pillion, co-chair of InvestSWVA, said in a statement. “It is important to note that as a technology firm, Paymerang is on the cutting edge of helping its clients perform better and more securely, freeing employees to focus on relationships, not just tasks. This is the story of Virginia’s Southwest, too: pioneering new solutions to business challenges while supporting quality of life.”