Global payroll co Deel raises $156m at $1.25b valuation

• Published date: 21 April 2021
• Date: 21 April 2021
• Author: Ofir Dor

Deel was founded in 2018 by CEO Alex Bouaziz, 27, and chief revenue officer Shuo Wang, both graduates of MIT. After MIT, Bouaziz moved to London and began a doctorate in environmental engineering at Imperial College, London but decided to drop out and return home to Israel, to pursue an entrepreneurial career. He founded the startup Lifeslice, which among other things developed an app enabling friends around the world to produce video clips together. The company did not make the hoped for breakthrough but Bouaziz came away with a very important insight.

"I was working in Israel but the company had engineers in the US, France and the UK. In order to pay them, I had to manually transfer money from Bank Leumi's website. It worked terribly and did not meet local regulations. The entire experience was not good."

Wang had also founded a startup in the US and encountered the same problem. Consequently they teamed up to found Deel, which has developed a platform that allows companies to produce contracts for employees and freelancers in over 150 countries and pay their salaries in local currency, while complying with regulations in each country.

It's not accurate to describe Deel as an Israeli company or for that matter as an American or French company. The company has promoted a globally dispersed business model and has 120 employees in 26 countries, including 20 in Israel but doesn't actually have any offices anywhere in the world."

Bouaziz explains. "To you it sounds perhaps strange but from my point of view it's normal. We hire the best employees in the world on the basis of their talents and not according to the country they are from, or where they are located. We have a CTO and engineering team in Israel, engineers in Brazil and sales people in Chicago. Of course this has disadvantages. I would be delighted to throw a barbecue with all these people or pat people on the shoulder and tell them exactly what I want from them. But this approach allows us to grow much more quickly than we otherwise could, if we were only hiring in Tel Aviv.

Bouaziz is something of a globetrotter. He grew up in France and immigrated to Israel with his parents when he was 16. After studying at the Technion in Israel, MIT in the US and his aborted Ph.D. in London, he returned to Israel to become a startup entrepreneur. He prefers to be interviewed in English, peppered with Hebrew, and still feel he is undergoing the immigration process. His partner Shuo Wang is based in San Francisco...