KittyBanuta

Explorer. Empath.Ambivert
Sales dev Expansion manager @Deel

[deel @deel]

Something's being stitched together.

Details tomorrow. 🧵

[KittyBanuta @BanutaKitty]

@Bouazizalex 🚀🚀🚀

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

Deel has acquired Sastrify, a leading AI-powered SaaS procurement & management platform.

Pumped to welcome Sven Lackinger, Max Messing, and the whole Sastrify team!

This is the 14th acquisition we've done at Deel.
Maybe good opp to speak about how we think about M&A:

- Don't make a deal unless it's a "hell yes"
Deals that didn't go very well were those that we were 70-85% certain. Aim for 85-99% certainty. There's enough information out there. Everything must make sense: product, roadmap, financials, and people.
You can't hope to convert hundreds of people into your culture. We go for those who already operate like we do.
Sven, Max, and their team are outstanding. We're lucky to now have them as colleagues.

- Acquire for expertise & accelerate time to market.
In 2019, we started going down the legal rabbit hole of hiring abroad. How to set up entities in other countries, different regulatory environments concerning payroll, gross-to-net salary calculations, tax compliance.
It took us 5 years of building to have an operationally great product. We can't pretend to do the same in 6 months for other products. People like Sven and Max -who have obsessed over theirs for 5-15- years are invaluable.

- We want to own 100% of the customer experience.
We started Deel IT with devices. Now we're expanding into the full software lifecycle - licenses, renewals, spend optimization. Customers want to use less vendors; it's simpler. And the more things we own at Deel, the more details we can be in.

- Integration time can get halved by doing the right things.
At Deel, we follow a simple process that cut integration time by 50%+ without adding extra risk.
Step 1: Rebuild frontend inside Deel while keeping the backend running underneath. v1 live within a month.
Step 2: Put that v1 in the hands of sales org so the 9–12 month ramp to selling comfort starts on day one.
Step 3: In parallel, engineering rebuilds the full backend natively and migrates all customers over 3–12 months.
Step 4: By month 12, the product is fully native and the sales team is already trained.

- AI is compressing the timeline even more.
The hardest part of M&A has always been rewriting backends, migrating data, and stitching systems together.
But engineers are shipping code at 4x the pace of two years ago. What used to be the bottleneck in every acquisition isn't one anymore.
And the faster you integrate, the faster you realize the synergies and compound your advantage.

- The only good deal is one where both sides look back five years later and say they're happy it happened.

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

We just wrapped The Big @deel 2026 - and this one felt different. 🚀

Today is also Deel's 7th birthday. 7 years, 40,000+ companies, $22B in payroll processed.

This year we connected every stage of the worker lifecycle into one platform. Here's what we launched 👇🧵

[Steven Tey @steventey]

FINALLY got my EB-1A Extraordinary Ability Green Card 🇺🇸

After ~9 years of sleepless nights worrying about visas, I can now proudly call myself a permanent resident of the United States.

Thank you @dubdotco + @deel, it's time to build 🦅

[KittyBanuta @BanutaKitty]

@deel @jpmorgan Get your pitches ready! May the best one win 🚀

[deel @deel]

Calling all founders 📢

Deel is launching The Pitch — a global startup pitch competition, presented by @jpmorgan

Up for grabs…

💰 Up to 100 regional winners receive $50,000 in investment
🌍 Up to 10 global champions win $1M in investment
🤝 Plus access to exclusive startup perks and a global founder community

If you’re building something bold, this is your moment.

Apply now 👉 https://t.co/CjDotU4vPC

[Joe Kauffman @thejoekauffman]

First time at Davos with @wef last week! Shared my top takeaways with our @Deel team – https://t.co/LchqQPLECC

[KittyBanuta @BanutaKitty]

@Bouazizalex @deel What a great way of sharing knowledge and giving back 😍

[Joe Kauffman @thejoekauffman]

Pumped to be the official HR platform Partner of @Arsenal! ⚽️✨

It was a special moment to be there with @Bouazizalex and the Arsenal team on game day! And we've been blown away by today's welcome, especially from the fans. Excited to win together over the months and years ahead! #COYG

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

We are officially entering the @premierleague 🎉

Proud to announce Deel is the Official HR Platform Partner of @Arsenal ⚽

This is our first major move into sports. Thrilled to welcome Arsenal as a @deel customer to power their workforce operations.

Let's go 🔴⚪

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

Deel data: Forward Deployed Engineer roles grew 10× this year.

The rise of AI apps + a Palantir-style “engineers work with customers” playbook is reshaping what technical work is.

Feels like we’re watching a new operating model form in real time!

[deel @deel]

🇪🇸 What an incredible week at @Workday Rising EMEA in Barcelona!

The Deel team had an amazing time connecting with customers, partners, and the broader Workday community and hosting our fireside chat on @Barings' Journey to Automated, Harmonized, and Centralized Payroll with Workday, featuring Nathan Peetz (Barings) and Ryan Freeman (Deel).

🙌 Congrats to our raffle winner, and thank you to everyone who entered and stopped by to meet the team.

#WDAYRisingEMEA

[deel @deel]

If your “finance stack” is 12 tabs and one exhausted founder… this one’s for you.

@sashaorloff (@puzzlefin ) and @DanWestgarth (Deel) sat down on The @TurpentineMedia Finance Podcast to unpack what happens when your payroll, taxes, and books sync in one click.

Spoiler: AI does the heavy lifting, so you can stop reconciling and start building.

Get started now 👉 https://t.co/hiYTiPynVQ

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

50k employees accross 24 countries!!

So proud of the @deel team for bringing home one of the world’s major banks. One of the largest deels in our history.

Can’t wait to deliver 🚀

[KittyBanuta @BanutaKitty]

@Bouazizalex @thejoekauffman @deel @pbouaziz Exciting times ahead and what high calibre of people joining us on our trip 🚀

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

We grew to $1B ARR faster than Stripe, Salesforce, and Palantir, while being 100% remote

This was a combination of a lot of luck, focus and an excellent team

Looking back, I can our team's success boils down some key principles I'm sharing in a 700-word long post:

I hope that it will help every startup as much as it helped us:

1. Everything is sales.
Recruiting is sales. Fundraising is sales. Retaining your best talent is sales. Dating is sales. And sales is sales.
A founder’s effectiveness = (technical skill × ability to sell).

2. You need to be in the details.

The best founders can zoom all the way in and out. If someone tells you to “scale yourself” by pulling back too early - they’re wrong.

Being in the details is important to understand what org structure best fits your company's goals. Every 'in the weeds' founder designs their org structure from first principles.

Jensen: 40 direct reports,
Elon: Engineers in charge of everything,
Jobs: Creative Dictatorship with Directly Responsible Individuals.
Zuck: The first growth-hacking team with @chamath

Founders not in the details forget what makes their products great and eventually recede into designing a standard org with standard departments which lead to standard results.

3. Your company's fate is 70% sealed by the first 20 hires

Ben Horowitz: "I got this advice like 27 times. They said 'Look, here's the key: Hire A players:' and I was like ok yeah, my plan was to hire a bunch of morons but now I'm going to hire A players" The hard part isn’t intent, it’s judgment.

The problem is you can't spot a top 1% engineer if you're not a top 10% engineer yourself. This applies to everything.

Your definition of great is just what you've seen. Founders have some blind spots. Technical founders usually build bad marketing orgs. Sales-focused founders sometimes build mediocre product teams. You need the right eyes to be able to spot genius. Ego aside, bring on a technical expert and have them vet talent for you. Your first hires are your culture, your standard, your work environment. They are the company. Get the first 20 hires right.

4. Live with your customers.

You can’t know what’s working if you’re not talking to them - all the time.
Be where they are: WhatsApp, calls, DMs, in person. The closer you are to customers, the fewer mistakes you make.

"The customer is the boss. They can fire everybody by choosing to spend their money elsewhere." - Sam Walton

5. Be extremely responsive.
If I reply in 30 seconds, what usually takes a day gets done in hours.
What takes hours gets done now.
Speed compounds.

6. Your TAM is limited by your imagination, not by the market.
Constantly rethink the pod, find other big issues that need solving and are valuable, and solve them exceptionally well. We went from contracts ($100M) to Employer of Record ($300M) to Payroll ($200M).
Each 3x'd the TAM.

7. Never run out of cash.
The only way a business dies is by running out of cash.
Profitability = power. You call the shots, not investors.
You can always act in the company's long-term interest because you know you are safe.
We reached Series A after spending <10% of our seed.
We have been profitable for the last 3 years.

Cash discipline buys freedom.

8. Over-index on angels early.
Angels are your best shot at making important people care - when it matters. They might not be involved day to day, but when you really need help, they’ll show up. If you don't know how to solve a problem, you should know at least a person who knows the person who can.

Pick the right ones, and time your asks well.

9. There's always something out there that can kill your company.
Your job is to de-risk the company. Capital, talent, and products are all a small part of a larger effort to de-risk your startup and build an enduring business. Covid-induced work from home grew our payroll and EOR business. And it seemed like RTO might kill it. But we were prepared. If you worry, you won't have to worry.

10. Stay focused.
Fundraises, competitors, headlines - all noise.
Focus on your customers. Focus on your product. Keep executing.
In the long run, the most relentless team wins.

11. Trust your instinct.
If something feels off - it probably is. Dig deeper.
Courage in your convictions matters, especially as the team grows.
Don’t let “performative democracy” slow you down.

As long as you’re in the seat, lead decisively - and unapologetically.

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

Introducing: AnyTime Pay 💸

"Payroll is on the 30th - but give me what I've earned till today."

This changes everything for 500M+ employees living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Deel is at $1B+ ARR serving only 1.5M employees. AnyTime Pay is how we completely change the payroll industry and 10x our scale.

Imagine this: you're a retail employee at a Deel-powered company. You take your earned pay on the 10th for rent, again on the 20th for groceries, and again on the 30th.

Once you experience that freedom, waiting 30 days to get paid anywhere else will feel ancient.

73% of employees say a one-week delay in their paycheck would cause major stress. That's because life is built around payday.

So why hasn't anyone done this before?

Because employers need to remit the correct taxes for each employee and mid-month payments would require instant tax calculations - which has been impossible.

Here's how it works today: Companies send employee data to local payroll providers who manually calculate taxes based on hundreds of constantly changing laws (brackets, job type, country, gender, etc.). The provider calculates everything and sends it back. This entire process takes 10+ days.

The bottleneck is that employers have to wait 10 days to know how much tax to remit for each employee, making mid-month payments impossible.

It's such a huge problem that there's a $1T loan industry to help people cope with 30-day pay cycles. 40% interest credit cards, BNPL, payday loans - they exist because people can't access their own earned money.

Deel is changing that. We're building global payroll infrastructure across 160 countries - our own rails that calculate taxes in real time.

Gross-to-net happens instantly, taxes are computed in seconds, and employees can access their earned pay - anytime.

This might sound boring. But to 500M+ employees living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is life-changing.

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

Deel has raised $300M at a $17.3B valuation

We started about 6 years ago, struggling to even make $10K.

I've never shared this before because of how embarrassing our start was.

The story of how we went from $1K to $1B and the advice I'd give to my younger self:

[KittyBanuta @BanutaKitty]

@Bouazizalex For anyone thinking success just pops up out of nowhere or some sort of magic, read the step by step shared - it's a lot of hard work, persistence and lessons humbly learnt along the way. Onto the next milestone 🚀