"We Got Funded!" UAE-Based Cercli's US$4 Million Seed Round Marks Silicon Valley-Based Afore Capital's Debut MENA Investment Launched by Akeed Azmi and David Reche, Cercli enables MENA businesses to hire, manage and pay their global workforce seamlessly while reducing the cost of compliance that arises due to human errors.
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Cercli, a UAE-headquartered payroll and employee data platform, has raised US$4 million in a seed round led by Afore Capital, a Silicon Valley-headquartered pre-seed venture capital (VC) fund. With this, Afore Capital has made its debut investment in the MENA region, with the capital being allocated from its $150 million fund III, which the VC firm claims to be the largest dedicated pre-seed fund in the market.
The seed round also saw the participation of COTU Ventures, a UAE-based VC and private equity firm, Y Combinator, the US-based startup accelerator for early-stage ventures, and Rebel Fund, a seed-stage VC fund and of the largest investors in Y Combinator startups. Additional investors in the round included Karim Atiyeh, co-founder and CTO of US-based spend management software platform Ramp, Sebastian Mejia, co-founder and President of Rappi, a Latin-American tech company, Tony Dong, Vice President of Engineering at US-based workforce management system Rippling, Tony Jamous, co-founder and CEO of US-based global employment platform Oyster, Allison Pickens, a solo general partner (GP) investor, as well as representatives from two of the MENA region's most notable unicorns: Kitopi, the UAE-based cloud kitchen platform and multibrand restaurant, and Careem, the UAE-based super app that offers services across ride hailing, food delivery, payments, and others.
Launched in early 2024 by Akeed Azmi and David Reche, Cercli offers a unified platform that enables MENA businesses to hire, manage and pay their global workforce seamlessly. More specifically, the firm helps businesses reduce the cost of compliance that arises due to human errors in this space. This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg of human resources (HR)-related issues that Cercli is aiming to address, notes its co-founder Azmi. "MENA is a large complex region, and until you start pulling back the layers you don't really see the challenges businesses face," he says. "Firstly, not only does every country have its own set of laws and regulations, but this is exacerbated based on the entity type and even nationality of team members, having their own treatment for compliance with labor laws, social insurance and pensions. We still see a number of companies use spreadsheets for saving data, managing employee records, running the payroll process and other critical workflows across a business. Errors are bound to occur due to manual intervention and, worse, this opens the door for fraud and data privacy leaks. Lastly, companies use various disconnected software vendors to manage aspects of their workforce. These isolated softwares don't "talk" to each other, meaning there is no single source of truth for their most valuable asset - their workforce- often one of the largest expenses on the profit and loss statement."
The Cercli team. Source: Cercli
It was upon these observations that Azmi and his co-founder Reche created Cercli with a mission to transform payroll, workforce management and compliance -right from on-boarding employees to off-boarding them- using a single unified platform for MENA businesses. The co-founders also reveal that much of their initial ideation process was built off of their previous experiences in scaling and managing teams at Kitopi and Careem. "We realized that if the most prominent tech startups faced issues managing payroll, expenses, onboarding etc on spreadsheets and clunky ERPs, then others would likely face the same," Azmi says. "We searched high and low for a program that just worked but couldn't, which led us to found Cercli to solve exactly this. To validate this, we interviewed more than 30 companies -from Saudi Aramco, one of the world's largest corporations, to a small mom-and-pop store in Dubai's Karama area- to understand how they run these processes."
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The co-founding duo's efforts have certainly reaped quick rewards, having already achieved a 25% month on month growth rate as well as having paid out over $23 million in clients' employee salaries across 31 countries. Another indicator of its impact has been the aforementioned list of entities and individuals who have backed the startup in this seed round. In a statement following the investment, Afore Capital co-founder and Managing Partner Anamitra Banerji noted that "this investment is reflective of our recognition of the massive untapped potential of the MENA region, and the possibilities that game changing founders are enabling here. In just a few months, Cercli has not only assembled a solid team of builders and operators, but has attracted marquee customers as well."
As such, the significance of this milestone isn't lost on Azmi and Reche. "We are extremely thrilled by the caliber of investors we've been able to attract!" Reche says. "Operating in a sector that requires extreme diligence and localisation for every market, we knew that we needed investors balancing regional know-how coupled with global reach. Each of these funds bring significant value and expertise that will be critical to our growth plans. We've also got backing from executives at global tech startups such as Ramp, Rippling along with local MENA operators, whose expertise we believe would be invaluable to us as we scale and build for our region."
David Reche and Akeed Azmi, co-founders of Cercli. Source: Cercli
Indeed, with this influx of new capital, the Cercli team already has its sights set on the next steps in scaling the business. "Since our launch we've been primarily focused on building out a core engineering and product team which today makes up 80% of our staff," Reche reveals. "This is an area where we'll continue to invest in as we evolve our platform to introduce new innovations within our product and for the sector. Further, we are making strategic non-tech hires to drive our growth in terms of expansion, sales and customer success."
'TREP TALK: Akeed Azmi and David Reche, co-founders of Cercli, share tips for entrepreneurs
Spend time with customers, and become an expert on the problem you're solving "Understand your customers' 'why' and do things that don't scale (but make sure to scale them later); funding will follow," Azmi says. "Validate that you are solving the right problem with a set of customers that are willing or paying for the solution you propose, and have conviction in the topic or problem you are trying to solve," adds Reche
Figure out your purpose or your "why" for starting the venture "This includes the values you wish to imbue along that journey," Azmi adds. "We believe that lasting organizations are values-driven organizations, and to truly build something impactful- it would take at least a decade or longer. Knowing your why, helps fuel you during that journey."
Find co-founder(s) that you trust "You must also have respect for them," Azmi says. "Make sure you bring in someone who has a high degree of integrity, complements your strengths and weaknesses, and brings an edge to the problem you're solving."
Ensure you can iterate fast "Don't make plans for over-hiring before you reach certain level of traction," Reche says.
