Deel, the all-in-one HR platform, grew from zero to over €300m in less than three years, making it the fastest-growing company in the world according to Benelux manager Dennis Valkema. Silicon Luxembourg interviewed him to learn more about the platform and its features.
How did Deel come to be?
When our co-founders Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang were looking for talent for their first venture, they struggled finding talent in the area they were looking for. And often, once they found the right talent, they were based outside of the country so it was hard to hire them because of legislative issues. Smart as they are, they decided to found Deel in 2019, an all-in-one HR platform that takes away all the hassle of legislation around hiring new talent.
You don’t have to set up an entity, we take care of the hiring and the payment and do everything in a 100% compliant way, regardless of the status of the employee. Whether they are a contractor or an employee of record or even on your payroll, we can pay them in every single currency and ensure that you have a full overview of your workforce on our platform.
What can clients working with you expect?
Let’s assume we find a client or prospective client that has the ambition to go global or to start hiring outside of the country because of a talent shortage, or because of ambitions of doing business elsewhere. That’s where we come into play. We show them the different types of employment that we provide, which is all of them, and we advise them on what would be the best way forward for them. Then we show them how to set up an employee, we help them with the first one to maybe five employees, after which they can do it themselves.
Then, at the end of the month, they get one single invoice for everything combined in their own currency. If we have a Luxembourgish company for example, they would get an invoice in Euro, even though if they have people in Sri Lanka and Brazil, the people would still be getting paid in their local currency.
How does your platform distinguish itself from other all-in-one HR solutions?
If you talk about transparent pay or equal pay, for example, you can run the reports on our platform, which is a huge differentiator from what is out there in the market. Usually, you need to download all the data, consolidate it, run additional reports. In our system you have one overview and the best part is that it’s relatively cheap if you compare it to setting up an entity.
We take care of all the heavy lifting. You can, within five minutes, hire an employee once you have found them, all within our system and from the onboarding process onwards we take care of the rest.
How present are you in the Luxembourg market?
We have some internal people working and living in Luxembourg and we also have a solid client base there already, especially in the tech and startup scene. But we see more and more traction in Luxembourg, which makes sense considering that many companies here have global aspirations. So for us, Luxembourg is really a hidden gem and we think we can make a big difference in the local economy.
Another thing that we see that makes a huge difference, which will also be particularly interesting for the Luxembourgish market is that we provide business services. So, if you have people that you do want to have in your country, we can still support that, put them on your payroll and ensure that they have the right paperwork in order to work for you.
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about your platform?
I cannot emphasise enough the ease of use of our platform. I was literally able to explain it to my mother. She understood it and she’s 70.
