Papaya Global Raises $100M At Over $1B Valuation

Papaya Global, a Tel Aviv cloud-based payroll and payment management platform, raised $100 million in a Series C funding round, the company announced last week, bringing its valuation to over $1 billion.

The new investment follows Papaya’s $40 million Series B funding in October and brings the company’s total funding to date to $190 million.

The Series C round was led by GreenOaks Capital Partners and joined by IVP Ventures and Alkeon, with participation from existing investors Insight Venture Partners, Scale Ventures, Bessemer Ventures, Dynamic Loop, New Era and Workday Ventures, Access Ventures and Group 11 

Papaya Global was founded by Eynat Guez, Ruben Drong, and Ofer Herman in 2016 with a vision to reinvent the global payroll, payment, and HR industries. Papaya offers an automated, cloud-based SaaS platform that provides a comprehensive solution – from onboarding to on-going management and cross-border payments – and that meets privacy standards and security regulations (GDPR, ISO, SOC). Papaya says its services are used in over 140 countries.

Papaya said it will use the new funding to meet the “demand for its global workforce management platform, reinforce its market leadership, and invest in its product, engineering and go-to-market teams.”

“We made a bold prediction in 2016 that Papaya’s technology would emerge as the most significant innovation for the global workforce and that we would become a standard for workforce management, just as ERP has in finance,” said Guez, who serves as CEO. “The market has proven that prediction was correct.”  

“With companies switching to remote work and compliance becoming increasingly complex, we are seeing substantial demand for Papaya’s solution, even in a challenging business environment,” she added.

“Papaya Global has built a best in class solution to onboard new employees, automate payroll, and manage a global workforce through a single pane of glass,” said Patrick Backhouse, Partner at Greenoaks Capital. “Both growing and established companies have dramatically changed their working practices in recent years, and Papaya has seen impressive growth as a result.”

The company it has been on a “hyper-growth trajectory” with 300 percent revenue growth year-on-year for each of the past 3 years.

“Modern enterprises are increasingly looking to combat talent shortages and rising costs in core markets by finding geographies where they can hire and innovate more quickly and more capital efficiently,” said Mark McLaughlin, General Partner at Alkeon. “Papaya’s leading technology enables their customers to seamlessly extend their human capital footprint globally in a way that is synergistic to their existing operations.”

“Papaya is not only offering the best technology in the field, but also a customer experience that has been called “mind-blowing” by our clients, a unique Center of Excellence to support clients’ needs in compliance, benefits, and labor laws globally,” Guez added.

(Check out Guez’s piece on scaling the company while also welcoming a child into the world, and navigating Israel’s COVID-19 lockdowns.)

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