Dear reader,
When you turn on the lights in your room, seldom do you think of the labor, engineering, design, conflict resolution, and daily maintenance that went into your city's electricity grid.
Same goes for payroll. The web of companies, software, and underlying humans that careen your salary to your bank account every month is obfuscated. When your salary doesn't land though, the importance of that payroll infrastructure becomes salient. For people living paycheck to paycheck, faulty payroll infrastructure can yield devastating consequences.
Cercli, a UAE-based startup, is laying the digital pipes that makes payroll (and other HR processes) run smoothly in MENA. They recently raised a $12M Series A.
Below is an interview with its co-founder and CEO, Akeed Azmi. In it, you'll find:
1) What Akeed's experience at two of MENA's largest startup successes (Careem and Kitopi) equipped him with for Cercli.
2) The holistic MVP Cercli had to construct (companies don't "test" a new payroll software for fun).
3) Cercli's YC experience, and what they took from it.
4) Why Cercli has no "official" prices for any of its products, and how it set up its sales strategy.
5) Cercli's international expansion strategy.
6) How Cercli differentiate themselves from their global, bankrolled competitors (Deel, Oyster, Rippling...).
... and much more.
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