Remote Hiring Startup Deel Secures $425M Series D Funding At $5.5B Valuation

By NoCamels Team October 18, 2021 2 minutes

Deel co-founders Alex Bouaziz (left) and Shuo Wang. Courtesy

San Francisco-based remote hiring firm Deel announced Monday that its latest funding series raised a whopping $425 million, taking the total sum the company has raised to $630 million.

The latest funding round values the company at some $5.5 billion, which represents a stratospheric rise for the firm, more than quadruple its April 2021 valuation, which stood at $1.25 billion. In that time, the company has also seen its customer base spike from 1,800 at the same time to more than 4,500.

This new funding round was led by US-based Coatue, with partners Rahul Kishore and Lucas Swisher leading the deal. Several new and existing investors also participated in this round, including Altimeter Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, the YC Continuity Fund, Spark Capital, Greenbay Ventures, Neo, and over 40 of the world’s leading operators. Andreesen Horowitz, the YC Continuity Fund and Spark Capital led the Series C funding.

Deel was founded in 2019 by Alex Bouaziz, a French immigrant to Israel who completed a degree at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and became an entrepreneur and investor, and Shuo Wang, who serves as the company’s chief revenue officer. Both graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT.)

Deel started as a four-person operation. It has now ballooned to more than 400 employees – nearly quadrupling its staff since its April valuation – as it seeks to make work more accessible for teams and businesses across the world. Its mission is to streamline the onboarding process for remote employees as the companies grapple with new more flexible working arrangements.

The company is headquartered in San Francisco with an office in Tel Aviv.

Deel worldwide customers include names like Coinbase, Intercom and Shopify, and are represented by more than 150 countries. The company, which provides payroll, compliance tools and other services to help businesses hire remotely – and pay people in more than 120 currencies across various borders – has seen a massive surge in demand, particularly since the response to the coronavirus pandemic upended the traditional way that work has been structured.

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With more than 250 legal, accounting, mobility, and tax experts as partners, Deel enables any business to create, sign and send compliant localized contracts from a library of templates and pay teams.

This was a point that Bouaziz emphasized. “The way people work is fundamentally changing. And it’s never going back,” he said. “We founded Deel because we didn’t want hiring or payments to prevent businesses from building the best global teams and finding the best global talent. We’re going to keep challenging the norms of how companies operate and continue building tools that shape the future of work.”

Coatue is one of the largest technology investment platforms in the world with over $45 billion in assets under management, and its partners were impressed with Deel’s model and functionality.

“We had been tracking Deel since 2020 and were impressed by Alex and Shuo’s vision,” said Rahul Kishore, a Senior Managing Director at Coatue. “As we learned more about Deel, we became excited by their increased and impressive scale and believe we are in the early innings of what the team is capable of.”

Lucas Swisher, a General Partner at Coatue who co-led the round, added, “We were then impressed by how the platform was able to distill something so overwhelming into a tool anyone can use to take global employment from dream to reality.”