Cercli, a leading HR venture in MENA, announced raising $4 million in a seed round, led by Silicon Valley-headquartered Afore Capital.
The company said the funding deal marks Afore’s MENA debut, with the investment being allocated from its $150 million fund III.
Cercli’s seed round also had participation from COTU Ventures, Y Combinator and Rebel Fund.
The founders and executives from unicorns such as Kitopi and Careem and other notable MENA-based startups including the likes of Karim Atiyeh (Ramp), Sebastian Mejia (Rappi), Tony Dong (Rippling), Tony Jamous (Oyster) and Allison Pickens were the other investors, Cercli said.
Significantly, Cercli’s founders, Akeed Azmi and David Reche, previously scaled and managed teams at Kitopi and Careem, two of the region’s largest unicorns.
Circli said with a $2 billion market opportunity in MENA for payroll alone, and businesses facing burdensome compliance costs due to human error, it is on a mission to transform how businesses manage their workforce through one single platform.
“The cost of workforce-related compliance is one of the biggest challenges for C-suite executives across our region,” Akeed Azmi, co-founder, Cercli, said.
“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,” he added.
The company said since its launch in early 2024, it has grown by 25 percent month-on-month and has paid out over $23 million in clients’ employee salaries across 31 countries.
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