$25M Senior Credit Facility. Structured for a specialty finance company focused on SMB debt refinancing.

$75M+ Warehouse Facility. Structured for a specialty finance company focused on RE investments and fix-and-flips.

$10M Senior ABL Facility. Structured for an emergent, high-growth supplement company.

$150K Inventory Revolver. Structured for an emergent children’s hair care brand.

They say startups die from indigestion, not starvation. But what if you’re Deel — a $17.3B behemoth that’s been gorging on global payroll infrastructure, acquisitions, and revenue at a breakneck pace?

What if you’re also caught in a spy-versus-spy battle with your closest rival, Rippling? If the stakes weren’t so high, it would be hilarious.

In just six years, Deel’s gone from Y Combinator grad to handling $22 billion in annual payroll across 150+ countries. They crossed $1 billion ARR this year, growing 70% annually and turning a profit. That’s gravity-defying scale speed.

Klarna replaced Workday’s HR system with Deel. Net retention is over 120%. They’ve expanded from contractor payments to a full HRIS, global mobility, visa services, IT equipment management, and more.

Whatever you call it — platform sprawl or strategy — it’s working. For now.

The Deel playbook is deceptively simple: start with global compliance, then layer on every adjacent service a remote team might need. Deel began as a way to pay contractors and full-time employees around the world without legal headaches. But instead of staying in its lane, it kept expanding… into HRIS, visa support, background checks, and even IT device management. They now operate 250+ legal entities across every continent. That’s a moat very few startups would even attempt to dig.

Most founders are scared of complexity because it slows you down. Deel ran straight at it and decided to make complexity the business. The more nuanced, fragmented, regulated, and painful the problem, the more defensible it becomes if you’re the one crazy enough to solve it. Deel was swallowing the entire stack of global employment. Payroll, compliance, onboarding, hardware logistics, even relocation. It evolved from being a bundle or a suite to an infrastructure layer disguised as software.

But owning everything doesn’t just mean building more features. It means accepting surface area as a competitive weapon. Every new function you add increases cross-sell potential and internal entropy. Deel knew that — and still sprinted. That tells you something about how high-conviction their team is about “full-stack globalization” as the future of work.

Their customer growth reflects that bet. They now serve over 35,000 companies. That’s startups, multinationals, and everything in between. The combination of breadth (150+ countries) and depth (payroll, compliance, benefits, HR, and more) gives Deel both the upsell engine and the lock-in effect.

Start with Deel for international contractors. End up running your entire people stack through them.

But I don’t see this as simply an expansion strategy. It’s a worldview: that the borders between employment, finance, and mobility are disappearing.

And if you believe that, then Deel has morphed into something beyond a SaaS company. It’s a new kind of utility, like a modern-day Telefónica for human capital. That’s the scale they’re swinging at. And that’s why every founder building a platform should pay attention. Deel’s redesigning the market map from the infrastructure layer up.

It’s an all-in-one strategy with serious teeth. And it’s powered by an unusually aggressive M&A machine. Deel has acquired at least 10 companies in just six years — including competitors like PayGroup (APAC), PaySpace (Africa), and Omnipresent (UK). These weren’t just acqui-hires or rollups. Each “deal” (ha!) brought new infrastructure, licenses, and domain expertise into the fold. Deel’s promise to customers is that it owns and operates its stack in-house, not through patchwork partners. That’s their quality edge.

The majority of companies treat M&A like a growth shortcut or a defensive moat. Deel uses it as a product development function. Acquisitions are not simply bolted on, but welded into the roadmap. And when done right, M&A becomes time travel. You skip 18–24 months of building by importing talent, code, and regulatory posture in one move. For a company trying to outpace the market in a winner-take-most category, that’s a pretty solid compounding flywheel.

The risk, of course, is coherence. Every acquisition adds entropy to the system. New teams, codebases, integrations, politics. Most companies get slower, not faster. But Deel’s bias toward control — owning infrastructure instead of reselling — has actually reduced their surface area of risk over time. That’s rare.

And it points to something most operators overlook: you don’t get velocity from saying “yes” to everything. You get velocity by only saying yes to the things you can integrate ruthlessly. Deel has kept that discipline so far. They’ve publicly committed to maintaining a single codebase. And while that might sound like a technical detail, it’s actually a cultural one. It signals product unity, leadership focus, and long-term strategic clarity.

So far, customers seem happy. The number of clients using four or more Deel products has jumped 1,200% in the last year. But enterprise software has a long memory. If any part of the suite feels bolted on or breaks under scale, those same customers will start looking elsewhere. And with alternatives like Rippling, Remote, Oyster, and Gusto all competing for the same logos, customer expectations are rising.

Let’s break it down: Rippling alleges that a Deel-paid mole infiltrated its sales team. This mole accessed every Slack mention of “Deel,” scoured Salesforce for client data, and vacuumed up internal playbooks. When Rippling planted a fake document — a honeypot — he clicked it 23 times a day. When they caught him, he tried to delete all evidence. Then he flushed his phone down the toilet. He’s since admitted everything.

Rippling’s lawsuit isn’t subtle. It names Deel’s CEO Alex Bouaziz, his father (Deel’s chairman), and COO Dan Westgarth. It claims the espionage was coordinated, deliberate, and criminal. It cites RICO — the statute often used for mob prosecutions. Rippling calls Deel “a criminal syndicate.”

Deel, of course, denies it all. They counter-sued, alleging that Rippling had embedded its own fake user into Deel’s platform. Both sides accuse each other of copying product features based on stolen plans.

Basically, it’s a Silicon Valley cold war, and it’s playing out through subpoenas, memes, and media leaks.

This is what can happen when growth outruns governance. When the scoreboard is ARR and valuation, and nobody stops to ask what kind of company you're becoming to win. Founders don't wake up and decide to play dirty. It’s death by a thousand rationalizations. Competitive pressure. Revenue targets. A juicy logo in a crowded RFP. Before long, your top competitor is embedded in your Slack… or you’re embedded in theirs.

The culture that lets you justify espionage often starts as the culture that celebrates “whatever it takes.” That same culture can build billion-dollar products. But left unchecked, it metastasizes. And when it does, it’s no longer a feature of high performance. It’s a liability masquerading as hustle.

This is all a mirror for the ecosystem. In a market where speed is worshipped and outcomes are public, founders will be tempted to blur lines. Especially when rivals are raising mega-rounds and stealing headlines. But how you win matters. Because the moment you lose trust — with customers, investors, your own team — you can’t buy it back. And no M&A deal or PR agency will un-flush that phone.

If you ever wanted a front-row seat to startup warfare, this is it. So, who’s going to walk away with their integrity intact? That’s what everyone is watching for now.

Amid all of this, both companies are still… winning.

Rippling raised $450M at a $16.8B valuation earlier this year. Deel raised $300M at $17.3B. Both are growing fast, profitable, and relentless. If anything, the scandal seems to be fuel, not friction.

Each new product launch feels like a countermove. Expense management. Device provisioning. HRIS features. You can’t tell if it’s competition or performance art. The result is a feature war disguised as a category race, and both are sprinting.

From $1M to $1B ARR in under four years to $100M in revenue in a single month. I’m pretty sure that’s record-breaking in B2B SaaS. If you only read the metrics, Deel looks unstoppable.

But behind every chart is a culture. And behind every culture is a choice. You can scale your roadmap. Can you scale your ethics? Can you scale your leadership judgment as fast as you scale your hiring?

That’s the tension smart operators are watching. The numbers say dominance, the headlines say drama, and the truth is probably somewhere in between (and getting clearer by the quarter).

The market is enormous. Global payroll and compliance is a multi-trillion dollar space. Remote work isn’t going away. Whether hybrid or async or fully distributed, every company will need infrastructure to manage people across borders. Deel’s TAM is massive, and so far, they’re making the most of it.

But when markets get this big, gravity shifts. Suddenly, you’re not just competing on product — you’re competing on narrative/brand/perception. Founders in the category are managing expectations, defending reputations, and rewriting what “enterprise-ready” means in public.

Investors love a fast horse. And Deel has galloped past nearly every metric that matters. But now, as the company scales into the stratosphere, the next chapter hinges on reputation, resilience, and restraint.

Platform companies are in the business of selling trust, which probably compounds slower than ARR. Court cases won’t stay buried in legal briefs forever. Board decks leak. Employees talk. And even the most loyal customers start to get uneasy when the headlines get dark.

Deel claims to enable talent anywhere. But talent has options. Top engineers and operators want to build somewhere with ambition and values. Somewhere they don’t have to explain the headlines to their friends. Culture isn’t what you put on Notion. It’s what you tolerate under pressure.

And this moment seems like the ultimate stress test… for the product, the leadership, and for whatever story Deel wants to tell next.

The opportunity ahead of Deel is real. If they pull it off, they’ll become the infrastructure layer for global work, like the AWS of employment or the Visa of borderless HR. That’s the dream.

But if the legal mess expands, or if their speed-to-product starts to backfire, or if enterprise clients decide they’d rather go with a drama-free competitor, Deel’s dominance may peak earlier than they expect.

So, the lessons here:

In this race, execution is everything, but also, integrity is insurance. Deel might win the market, but only if it doesn’t lose itself first.

Over the next 12 months, the SaaS world will be watching what Deel does. Not just the product roadmap or earnings run rate, but how they handle scrutiny. Will they double down on discipline? Will they address the cultural undercurrent that allowed espionage accusations to surface in the first place?

If Deel emerges from this clean — legal wins, product stability, near-zero executive turnover — it will signal something rare: a hypergrowth startup that survived both market pressure and moral pressure. That’s what separates the legacy companies from hype cycles.

So far, Deel’s story reads like an epic. The next chapter will reveal if it’s also a legacy.

Palantir gave new employees Impro, a book on theatrical improvisation, to help them navigate one of the world’s most secretive companies. A little eccentric? Or a bet on adaptability > procedure?

In a market where everyone seems to be defaulting to playbooks or policies, Palantir is choosing presence. Whether or not you like how they operate, you can’t argue with the implication: alignment through mindset, not mandates. I’ll need to buy a copy.

A few years ago, this deal would’ve been too large, too illiquid, too complex. Now it’s oversubscribed, investment-grade, and traded like bonds.

BlackRock, Pimco, and Citadel just gave hyperscale infra a playbook for liquidity. If you’re building in AI, this is the template for how capex gets done in a market that demands both speed and structure.

New research shows that 92% of H1 2025 GDP growth came from AI infrastructure spend. That’s a generational shift in where innovation is driving productivity.

📌 Fix the first mile. Acquisition is vanity if onboarding sucks. The first five minutes decide your LTV.

📌 Metrics are useless without motion. Every dashboard should trigger an action, not applause.

📌 Cash is a strategy, not a safety net. The startups that survive downturns treat liquidity like a product feature.

Markets remain near highs. Stocks are steady, yields easing, gold cooling off, and bitcoin slipping. Growth’s intact — but the easy gains are gone.

Fal.ai, a startup that hosts image, video, and audio AI models for developers, has closed a new round valuing the company at $4 billion.

Ripple announced a ~$1 billion acquisition of treasury-software provider GTreasury, marking its third nine-figure deal this year.

Enko Capital secured a $100 million first-close for its Africa-focused private credit fund, highlighting continued strength in direct lending.

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To your growth,

Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn for more insights on finance, strategy, and the future of capital.