Afore Capital, based in Silicon Valley, led a $4 million seed round for Cercli, the global workforce hiring, management, and payment platform for MENA businesses. With this historic transaction, Afore makes its MENA debut. Fund III, which has a $150 million allocation, is used for the investment.
Along with the likes of Karim Atiyeh (Ramp), Sebastian Mejia (Rappi), Tony Dong (Rippling), Tony Jamous (Oyster), Allison Pickens, and the founders and executives of unicorns Kitopi, Careem, and other noteworthy MENA-based startups, Cercli’s seed round also included participation from COTU Ventures, Y Combinator, and Rebel Fund.
With the MENA region offering a $2 billion market for payroll alone, and companies having to pay high compliance costs as a result of human error, Cercli is determined to revolutionize workforce management with a single platform.
The founders of Cercli, Akeed Azmi and David Reche, saw the need for a comprehensive solution to manage an international workforce experiencing hypergrowth while scaling and managing teams at two of the largest unicorns in the region, Kitopi and Careem.
“The cost of workforce-related compliance is one of the biggest challenges for C-suite executives across our region. We built Cercli to replace multiple isolated systems as the singular modern payroll and employee data platform, empowering businesses to manage their local payroll, remote contractors, employer of record, HR, onboarding and more. Today, we are excited to welcome globally renowned investors whose experience in supporting early-stage companies will propel our growth across our core markets and adjacent product SKUs,” said Akeed Azmi, co-founder, Cercli.
The use of spreadsheets and fragmented legacy software for specialized tasks has presented challenges for businesses in the area, resulting in fraud, data privacy, payroll errors, delays, and other problems. Cercli replaces disjointed individual systems with a single platform that unifies all back-office operations, enabling businesses to preserve data integrity and a single source of truth across their most valuable asset—their workforce.
Cercli has expanded by 25% every month since its launch in early 2024 and has paid out over $23 million in client employee salaries across 31 countries.
“At Cercli, Akeed and David are building to solve one of the region’s largest challenges—managing a global workforce while meeting compliance requirements. 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,” said Anamitra Banerji, co-founder and managing partner of Afore Capital.
Cercli’s platform is locally tailored to comply with labor law revisions and market-specific regulatory changes, all while keeping the needs of the customer in mind. Customers can easily connect into the Cercli platform, which serves as their main source of truth, thanks to integrations the company’s technology team has built into HR, finance, accounting, legal, and IT software.
Global behemoths like Microsoft, ADP, and Accenture, as well as local unicorns like Kitopi and Careem, have drawn top talent to Cercli from all over the world. Cercli is an engineering and product-focused organization that employs 80% of its workforce to build its products horizontally across several markets and product verticals.
