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When Rumala Sheikhani started participating in shows like It’s always sunny in Philadelphiashe processed extras’ paperwork – timecards, or vouchers, for daily work bookings – by manually calculating payments in Excel spreadsheets. “You have 500 people who show up for a day and leave, so it’s very difficult to track their paperwork and make sure they’ve filled it out. They’re W-4s, I-9s, complicated tax documents,” she says.

Sheikhani, who began her career at professional services giants PwC and Ernst & Young before working in production accounting at Searchlight Pictures and NBCUniversal, took those long days of paperwork and launched her own company with a focus on streamlining the compensation process specifically for background actors.

This company, Everyset, launched in early 2016 under the name Castifi (it was renamed in 2022, aiming to better reflect the entire production team on film and television projects). Founded alongside Ebrahim Bhaiji, who had worked on technology and product at NFL Media before joining as CEO, Everyset focused on introducing back-end actor management software – digital vouchers to manage the workflow of on-set extras.

It didn’t click at first. “We started working with SAG-AFTRA to develop all these union calculations to do everything that was necessary to create a digital voucher and start distributing it,” Sheikhani says. “This was before the pandemic. A lot of studios and productions got a lot of ‘no’s’. Everyone in the industry was saying ‘there’s no way we’re going digital, we’re OK with paper.'”

Then COVID-19 hit, the guilds agreed on a series of safety protocols, and all Hollywood jobs saw some benefit in a zoomed-in digital overhaul built from the practicalities of the early 2020s. Today, Los Angeles-based Everyset has more than 50 employees and studio clients, including Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Paramount, Skydance and Apple. Its technical and background casting software was used on Sean Baker’s Oscar-winning AnoraAmazon MGM ChallengersApple TV+ Breakup and Prime Video The summer I became prettyamong other projects.

For its next phase, Everyset is securing venture capital backing for an expansion, raising $9 million in new funding in a round led by Bay Area VC Crosslink Capital and early-stage company Haven Ventures to pivot from a software provider to a deep-pocketed payroll company itself in the near term. processing space.

In doing so, it will seek to further compete with Central Casting, the century-old Hollywood icon (think: “Straight out of Central Casting”) that has dominated the industry and is part of industry payroll giant Entertainment Partners. “Earlier, we would just organize people to work on set, recruit them and provide them with these vouchers, and then we would send them to a payroll company,” says Bhaiji. “We raised these funds to become a background payroll company.”

The processing of extras’ job bookings helped give Everyset a window into the current labor situation, as Hollywood grapples with major studios reducing the number of big annual theatrical bets and shortening TV episode orders compared to the Peak TV days of just a few years ago.

Interesting trends are emerging in major production centers. Georgia, arguably the U.S. country with the most generous tax incentive program given that it does not cap its allocation of state dollars, now processes the largest number of extra job bookings in Everyset’s data set.

“Over the last couple of years, we’ve only seen a downward trend during the streaming wars,” Bhaiji observes of production trends, before mentioning a glimmer of hope. “Now with the tax incentives in New Jersey and New York, and with California coming back online, we’re seeing work come back dramatically. We’re currently seeing almost 30% month-over-month job growth on the background artist side.” Everyset processes approximately 15,000 background acting jobs per month across the country on feature films and television projects.

The question remains open as to whether this pace will be able to keep up. There are a number of well-funded AI startups that implicitly (and ominously) promise to do away with Hollywood sets as the industry knows them and instead offer, for example, cheap versions of AI-generated crowds with a few prompts in post-production. But for now, “it’s still cheaper to hire a person,” notes Bhaiji, when it comes to studio projects that still aim for high-level production values.

For Everyset, the goal is additional fundraising next year to expand beyond background players and begin competing as a full-service payroll company tackling crew processing (which happens on a weekly cadence versus daily vouchers for extras). That would put it in more direct competition with Entertainment Partners, as well as payroll giants like Cast & Crew, new entrants like Wrapbook, and other talent and crew providers like Greenslate, which also bills itself as an “alternative to the traditional paper-based systems that have stifled production efficiencies since the 1970s.”