Nigel Ellis-Goodwin

Proud moment for everyone at Deel. From the 2026/27 season, we will officially become Arsenal Football Club's new sleeve partner 🔴⚪️ When we announced our partnership with Arsenal last year, we set out to build something lasting. We're working closely with the club to roll out our platform across its workforce and HR operations. Putting Deel on one of the most iconic shirts in world football is a fitting next chapter. To mark the moment, we worked with Arsenal on 'Patchmaker', a film featuring Viktor Gyökeres and club legend Patrick Vieira. Worth watching Yes, I'm a PSG fan. But like every French kid, I grew up dreaming in front of Arsène, Titi and the Invincibles! #COYG 👇

I haven't been this excited for a market launch in forever. This product is the result of relentless iteration, abstract thinking, and compounding ambition. I've seen operators left truly speechless, able to build the workflows of their dreams overnight. I've seen product managers change their entire roadmaps, and I've seen business analysts do what used to take them months in minutes. We knew what AI was fundamentally capable of, but we couldn't find a tool where it could be properly applied. We couldn't find a tool with the connectivity or the agility necessary to transform our operating model. So we built our own. Akai is a brain at the centre of the company, connected to everything. Deel's entire operations run on it. 91,000 hours saved every single month. 8,000+ hours of payment processing, now background tasks. Reconciliation that took 20+ days, now done in minutes. We've reached 100% automation in areas we couldn't get to through years of coding. What changed everything wasn't just automation. It's accumulation. Show it a task once. It builds the connectors, automates every step, and connects it to everything else. Each workflow makes the whole system smarter. The longer it runs, the more it understands your entire operation. Your team in control at every step. Every action logged and auditable. Today we're opening it up to everyone. Your team, supercharged.

Deel has raised $300M at a $17.3B valuation Shuo and I started about 6 years ago, struggling to even make $10K I've never shared this before because of how embarrassing our start was. 1/ Shuo and I were in completely different worlds. She was in China, I was in Israel. Both my parents family emigrated from North Africa with nothing. One of my grandfathers used to work at the French subway and the other was an electrician. I grew up in a entrepreneurial family, but when we arrived in Silicon Valley, we were outsiders. 2/ Our original idea was to ensure freelancers get paid and not ghosted after delivering work. We built an escrow platform where money would be locked upfront and automatically released when milestones were completed. 3/ We pitched Reddit freelancers our milestone-based contracts. Nobody cared. The crushing realization: contractors don't choose payment methods, clients do. 4/ We entered pivot hell. I started being a collection agency for freelancers using our product sending legal letters to companies We recovered $7,000 from a $15,000 invoice after my email. The freelancer gave us $1,000. That was a huge WIN. 5/ We thought we'd found product market fit. But we never collected another dollar. 6/ Then a YC batchmate from Sunsama used our product differently. "I like tying contracts to payments and having payment happen as work gets done," he said. "Plus you're giving me contracts out of the box and a way to pay internationally." 7/ We listened to the customer and pivoted to a contracts product. 8/ Within ten days, on Demo Day we had 290 contractors, $5,000 monthly revenue. This business only scaled to +$100M. 10/ Throughout this time, I've had hundreds of customers on WhatsApp and Slack. (I still do this) Our customers told us what their bigger problems were. We listened. 11/ We launched Employer of Record - Deel would put people on its own payroll on behalf of the client and handle all compliance. This became a $300M ARR+ business. 12/ We then launched Payroll - a system to automatically do tax calculations and remit the correct tax and net salary to employees globally. This became a $150M+ business. 13/ 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 the last 18 months, we launched 6 more products, hit $1bn ARR and September was our first $100M revenue month. All good things start small and shaky.