Deel co-founders Shuo Wang and Alex Bouaziz. Photo Business Wire
Deel, an Israeli startup and unicorn that deals with payroll solutions for firms with international staffs, is now worth $12 billion. So, what should we call a company that is 12 times a unicorn?
So Deel has more than doubled its value since hitting a $5.5 billion valuation last October with a $425 million Series D round of funding. Axios reported that the new valuation came after a paltry $50 million raise from such new investors as Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, and existing company backers like Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital and Y Combinator.
Being a unicorn these days is getting to be less and less of a special thing, at least in Israel. Maybe they will need to raise the definition of a unicorn from $1 billion plus to over $10 billion. Either that or they will have to start calling them rabbits instead of unicorns.
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Founded in 2018 by Israeli Alex Bouaziz. 28, a French Jew who immigrated to Israel, and Chinese entrepreneur Shuo Wang, Deel offers a global payroll solution which it says helps businesses hire anyone, anywhere. Using a tech enabled self-serve process, the company boasts that its users can now hire independent contractors or full time employees in over 150 countries, compliantly and in minutes.
Bouaziz and Wang met when they were both students at MIT.
Deel’s big service is SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) – a messaging system that runs on a network of financial institutions. It is used by thousands of banks worldwide to communicate information on financial transactions in a secure and standardized way.
When Deel first hit unicorn status, the company said in a blog post, “It’s such a special moment for us because we did it entirely remotely with a wild bunch of talented people from 30 different countries. That’s right, the global payroll solution built to help businesses hire anyone anywhere (and uses the product themselves) did it all while looking good on Zoom.”
