For generations, the world's best jobs required a plane ticket and a visa. Alex Bouaziz watched his MIT classmates get $300,000 (405,000 SGD) offers from Google.

The same classmates who went back to their home countries? They made $30,000 (40,500 SGD) doing the exact same work.

Not because they were any worse, but because they were born on the wrong side of an invisible wall.

Alex knew the feeling. Both his parents' families had emigrated from North Africa with nothing. "When we arrived in Silicon Valley, we were outsiders," he'd later say.

His co-founder Shuo Wang understood too. She was sixteen and barely spoke English when she and her mother started selling motorcycles wholesale in America, fighting for every $10 (13.50 SGD) margin.

By 2018, both Alex and Shuo had built and sold startups. But as founders, they kept hitting the same walls trying to hire globally.

The first wall: visas. No matter how desperately a company wanted to hire you, or how hard you worked to perfect your skills, none of it mattered if you couldn’t get that visa.

You could be an MIT or Ivy League graduate, an incredible software engineer, valedictorian, or have a perfect resume. You still end up losing the opportunity.

The second wall was even more frustrating. Even without visa issues, companies still wouldn't hire remotely.

Setting up a local entity for one person? Navigating foreign tax laws? Managing international payroll? Far too complicated.

So, Alex and Shuo decided to tear down these walls instead of seeing others and themselves climb them.

Today, they run Deel, a $17.3B (23.4B SGD) platform helping 37,000+ businesses hire and pay 1.5M workers across 150+ countries.

They scaled from $1M to $100M (135M SGD) in annual recurring revenue in under 20 months.

This is the story of Deel, and how two founders who came from families who had to emigrate to find opportunity have empowered people to work and hire from anywhere by building the operating system for global work.

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😰 A recurring problem

"Where you're from really does matter in terms of the opportunities you might get," Alex realized. At MIT, he had incredible friends who went back to their home countries while others went to the Bay Area.

The salary difference was massive.

For Shuo, the problem hit differently. After selling her robotics startup to iRobot, she faced the same geographic barriers when trying to build global teams.

“Before Deel, there were three ways to hire people internationally,” Alex explained.

You could pay contractors through PayPal or TransferWise (now Wise) with "no legitimacy into the relationship, right? Like no contract in place, no understanding of local laws."

Or you could use local agencies that "take a [huge load] of money actually, plus percent on top." He'd seen markups from 10% up to 50%.

Or companies would just open an entity in Ireland and call themselves "global." "Those felt like second-class citizen experiences, right?" Alex said.

"They just weren't being treated as well as people that you'd hire locally." Alex and Shuo saw the same problem from different angles. Companies needed a way to hire globally without the nightmare.

The idea for Deel was born from these insights.

But it wasn't until 2019 that they took it to Y Combinator, the San Francisco-based startup accelerator that invested in companies like Reddit and Airbnb where their vision came to life.

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💡 The first product

Their pitch to Y Combinator was simple, but it was far from smooth-sailing.

Their first solution was based on the wrong hypothesis.

"Our hypothesis was, the reason why people don't work together globally is because there is no relationship of trust between the two parties," Alex said.

They thought smart contracts could solve it. This way, money would get unblocked when tasks were done.

However, they were struggling to even make $10,000 (13,500 SGD).

They entered what Alex calls "pivot hell."

In desperation, Alex became a collection agency for freelancers, sending legal letters to companies who hadn't paid.

"We recovered $7,000 (9,450 SGD) from a $15,000 (20,250 SGD) invoice after my email. The freelancer gave us $1,000 (1,350 SGD)." That was their biggest win.

They thought they'd found product-market fit. They never collected another dollar. "We pitched freelancers on Reddit our milestone-based contracts," Alex remembered.

"Nobody cared." The crushing realisation was that contractors don't choose payment methods, clients do.

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😤 The big pivot

The breakthrough came from an unexpected source.

"We actually pivoted into this idea one to two weeks before Demo Day (Demo Day is Y Combinator's big finale where startups in their program pitch to hundreds of investors in hopes of raising funding. It's make-or-break for most companies.) Alex recalled.

One of their early customers, a friend from YC batch company Sunsama, put $8,000 (10,800 SGD) into their PayPal holding system.

Alex was shocked: "Why are you doing this? What is wrong with you? It's so much money [at once]."

But the customer loved something specific: "The idea of tying contracts to money...you sign a contract with someone somewhere, they'll cosign or whatever.

And then, at some other point, you pay them in another way. The idea of bridging those two things was very appealing to him."

That was the revelation. "It was never about trust," Alex realized.

"It's about the ease of creating that relationship and doing it right." So Alex and Shuo flipped their entire approach.

Instead of going to freelancers, they went straight to companies: "Hey, we want to give you a great solution so that you can start paying your team globally."

Their first 100 customers came straight from the Y Combinator community of startups.

They interviewed batchmates, gathered feedback, and iterated quickly.

They built on top of existing payment infrastructure, integrating PayPal first, then TransferWise (now Wise) to handle international payouts.

"We had to grow," Alex said. "So whatever we needed to do from a customer perspective, I remember Shuo cold-calling hundreds of customers a day herself.

And she would not let that one go." Within ten days of the pivot, they scrambled to Demo Day with 290 contractors and $5,000 (6,750 SGD) in monthly revenue.

"This business only scaled to $100M (135M SGD)," Alex would later say.

It sounds small compared to the numbers Deel sees today. "But at the time, it felt like everything."

They were relentless about hitting 20% growth every month. "If you're not growing, then something is wrong, right? And if something is wrong, you better figure it out really fast."

By late 2019, that's exactly what they were doing. Growing 20% every single month.

Aaron Harris, their Y Combinator Partner and mentor, looked at him doing the first pitch prep. "And he's like, 'Everyone, they pivoted on Friday.'"

"Holy cow," Aaron remembers saying upon hearing the numbers. "Do you realize how well this is going?"

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🌍 COVID changed it all

In May 2020, as countries locked down and workers went full-time remote, Deel raised $14M (18.9M SGD) from tier-1 VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

They had actually raised it right around when COVID hit, maybe March, Alex couldn't remember exactly, but the timing was perfect.

"Perfect timing," Shuo said later. "It's in our genetics that we need to execute fast. Everything is time-sensitive."

Suddenly, every company had the same emergency.

Their director of engineering was relocating to Croatia. Their best designer was moving back to Indonesia. Their product manager wanted to work from Brazil.

"The reality before Deel was that it was honestly almost impossible to be completely compliant," says Christophe Pasquier, co-founder of Slite and one of Deel's earliest customers.

Just three months later, in summer 2020, they raised their Series B. "Yasmin, the other board member, DMed me on Twitter and basically gave us a term sheet like a week later.

It was the fastest one I've ever seen," Alex said.

By this point, they had burned only $350K (472K SGD) since their seed round and had "infinite runway technically." Revenue exploded from $1.4M (1.9M SGD) in 2020 to $169M (228M SGD) by 2022.

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🏗️ Building the full stack

As demand shot up, Alex and Shuo made a controversial decision. While every advisor said to stay lean and outsource the complex parts, they decided to own their entire infrastructure stack.

"Unless we own every inch of the chain, we cannot deliver on our promise to the client," said Aaron Goldsmid, Deel's head of product.

They had actually started by trying to aggregate local partners for their employee product.

"Three months into that, we realized, 'We don't control compliance. We're relying on those local agencies...We can't control the customer support experience, the customer success experience.'

And we pivoted straight into like, 'Okay, no, that's not going to work. Let's open our full infrastructure.'"

While most competitors relied on a patchwork of third-party partners, Deel built their own payroll engines, established legal entities in over 230+ countries and handled all compliance in-house.

A five-person "Navy SEAL" team was tasked with going from country to country incorporating local entities in rapid-fire succession.

"Set up a country too late," Wang explained, "and Deel might lose a geographic market."

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💨 Deel speed

Speed became their religion. They called it "Deel speed." "One of our key company values is speed," Alex explained.

"Your customers need something. Your customers have an issue. Be there and solve that within the next 30 minutes, one hour, as fast as you can for them."

Even at the end of 2021, Alex and Shuo were still personally handling customer support tickets.

"It just shows you care, and it shows that the product is evolving.

You can lead by example, which makes the whole company customer-centric." Alex still has over a hundred customers on his WhatsApp, "sending me feedback all the time."

Ryan Hoover observed: "I don't know how Alex does it. I'll text him or email him and he responds in like, five minutes."

Shuo brought this intensity to sales: "We are very efficient about our head count.

Our expectations on how much revenue each of our sales talent will be able to close—we have a very high standard there."

But she had a different philosophy than most: "We don't have a president's club...I believe everyone has this opportunity to close $1M (1.35M SGD) per year. I'm here to help them make that happen."

The speed came from being remote-first. With 3,000+ people across 100+ countries, someone was always working. They raised every funding round remotely.

At the time, they built the entire company without a single office. "The pros versus cons of being able to hire the best talent versus being forced into hiring in a 30-mile radius? It's outweighed like crazy."

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📈 Growing beyond payroll

As Deel grew, customers kept asking for more.

Not just contractor payments—full-time employees, benefits, visa applications.

Their entire global workforce through one platform.

They acquired companies like Legalpad for immigration services. Now, you could do more than just hire people from overseas, compliantly.

Deel was taking it one step further. You could even help them immigrate and secure the visas to work with you in-person.

"We want to help you hire people from all around the world, give them an amazing experience and help them move to the country of their dreams," Alex explained.

Unlike incumbents that rely on manual processes, Deel delivers the entire payroll stack through software, eliminating the need for humans in the loop.

"Now everyone's getting paid through Deel. What if we become the source of truth as well from an HR standpoint?"

They launched full HR products, US payroll, benefits—everything in one platform.

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📚 Listen, build, repeat

Throughout this journey, Alex kept hundreds of customers on WhatsApp and Slack. "I still do this," he says. "Our customers told us what their biggest problems were. We listened."

Each problem became a new product line.

They launched Deel EOR (Employer of Record), where Deel would put people on its own payroll on behalf of the client and handle all compliance. This became a $300M+ ARR (405M+ SGD) business.

They then launched Deel Global Payroll, a system to automatically do tax calculations and remit the correct tax and net salary to employees globally. This became a $150M+ (202M+ SGD) business.

"Deel was a remote only company, and as Deel grew, it became obvious to us what problems companies face running global teams. So, we built Deel for Deel."

In just 18 months, they launched 6 more products and hit $1B ARR (1.35B SGD).

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📊 The numbers

The growth was historic.

Revenue grew from $1.4M (1.9M SGD) in 2020 to $169M (228M SGD) in 2022. They scaled from $1M to $100M ARR in under 20 months.

Today, Deel serves more than 37,000+ businesses, from startups to global names like Reddit, Klarna and Cloudflare.

They process $22B (29.7B SGD) in payroll annually for 1.5M workers across 150 countries.

September 2025 was the company's third straight year of profitability and its first $100M (135M SGD) revenue month. They've raised $300M (405M SGD) in funding at a $17.3B (23.4B SGD) valuation in October 2025.

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💰 The $17.3B moment

And just a few weeks ago, in October 2025, Deel raised $300M (405M SGD) at a $17.3B (23.4B SGD) valuation. The investors weren't just anyone. Ribbit Capital, who'd backed Robinhood and Coinbase. Coatue, behind Spotify and DoorDash.

These firms bet on companies reshaping entire industries. "We're reimagining how payroll should work for the next century: fluid, real-time, and truly borderless," Alex said.

The growth metrics are staggering: 1,500% growth in US payroll, 600% growth in HR products.

Enterprise clients like Klarna, Pepsi, and Palantir now depend on their infrastructure.

From struggling to make $10K (13.5K SGD) to a $17.3B (23.4B SGD) valuation in six years. "All good things start small and shaky," Alex reflected.

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🌏 Building the future

"Globalization is inevitable," Alex believes. "The world is becoming and hopefully will become a smaller place, and we want to be the infrastructure to make this happen."

The mission is clear: "We want to help hundreds of millions of people get to work for the best companies in the world, regardless of where they're from."

"For me, Deel is about more than technology or growth; it's about unlocking opportunities for people everywhere." The invisible walls are still there.

But at $17.3B (23.4B SGD), Deel has started to break them.

Two founders who grew up as outsiders, whose families had to emigrate just to find opportunity, built the infrastructure so that millions wouldn't have to make the same choice.

Where you're born no longer determines where you can work. Now, you can choose where you want to work, and access the best opportunities anywhere.

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Takeaway Scoop (Special Founders’ Edition):

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A special edition with direct lessons from founders Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang on scaling Deel to $17.3B.

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Pivot fast when something's not working. They changed their entire business model just 1-2 weeks before Y Combinator Demo Day, scrambling to get 290 contractors and $5K MRR in 10 days. They'd struggled for months as a trust-based payment platform. The late pivot saved the company. After just six years, the same company that pivoted is now worth $17.3B.

Turn your own experience into your product roadmap. "We built Deel for Deel," Alex said. As a remote company with employees in 100+ countries, they experienced firsthand the problems companies face running global teams.

Solve your customers' biggest problems. Every problem their customers shared became a new product line. Global Payroll became a $150M+ ARR business. Their EOR service became $300M+ ARR. Listen to what problems keep coming up. If multiple customers have it, build the solution.

Speed is a competitive advantage. Deel made "Deel speed" their core value—solving customer problems in 30 minutes while competitors took weeks. Both founders personally handled support tickets even at $50M ARR. Alex keeps 100+ customers on WhatsApp and responds within minutes. This obsession with speed let them scale from 400 to 10,000+ customers in under 3 years.

Build globally from day one if that's your ambition. They established legal entities in 150+ countries before having customers in most of them. A five-person "Navy SEAL" team incorporated entities country by country. Set up a country too late and you lose that geographic market.

Know when to own your stack (and which parts to own). Every advisor told them to use third-party providers for payroll and compliance. Instead, they built their own payroll engines and established legal entities in 230+ countries themselves. This vertical integration gave them the control and speed competitors couldn't match.

Especially when you're scaling, build infrastructure for more capacity than your current scale. At every growth milestone, something specific broke. At 1,800 customers, they ramped up sales hiring but forgot RevOps. At 4,000 customers, support burned out and response times tanked. At 5,000 customers, product velocity died when they focused on upgrades over new features. The pattern was clear: whatever got them to each level broke getting to the next. Now they build for 2x ahead.

Your team sees breaking points before customers do. Listen to employee feedback like you listen to customers—they have insights rooted in day-to-day reality. Your talent is your most valuable asset with feedback rooted in day-to-day reality, so be proactive about getting it.

Don't wait for perfect data to make decisions. From paid ads to sales team productivity, inform any decision you can with data. But this is different in hypergrowth. At this point, waiting for complete data means moving too slowly. They made decisions fast, tracked results obsessively, and adjusted weekly.

Trust the process while building it. Get comfortable with the unknown. You'll test processes as you're building them, and the key is to keep moving while you figure it out.

Sometimes enterprise customers need to fail at building it themselves. Client churn is scary but can be temporary. If they love you, they'll come back. Focus on being the best option when they're ready to return.

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This article was written in partnership with Deel.

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About Deel

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Deel is the all-in-one payroll and HR platform for global teams. Built for the way the world works today, Deel combines HRIS, payroll, compliance, benefits, performance, IT asset equipment management into one seamless platform.

With AI-powered tools and a fully owned payroll infrastructure, Deel supports every worker type in 150+ countries, helping businesses scale smarter, faster, and more compliantly. Discover how Deel makes global work simple at deel.com.

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Request a 30-minute demo to learn more about how our solutions can help your business expand.

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