The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally transformed the world of work, and particularly recruitment.

Employers have realized that they no longer need to limit their hiring strategies to areas that are commutable to their offices. Instead, they can hire from anywhere and manage teams that are distributed across the world.

Of course, this is must easier said than done, particularly since there are lots of regulatory and compliance complexity. This is where HR tech comes in.

One booming HR tech startup in the space is Deel, which became a HR tech unicorn back in April 2021 after a $156 million Series C.

Now Deel has increased its value five-fold with a $425 million Series D raise led by Coatue. The company claims its $5.5 billion valuation makes it the highest valued company in the global hiring, payments and compliance space.

Other investors who participated in the round include Andreessen Horowitz, YC Continuity and Spark Capital, who led the Series C.

Talking about the investment, Coatue senior managing director Rahul Kishore noted: “As we learned more about Deel, we became excited by their increased and impressive scale and believe we are in the early innings of what the team is capable of.”

Coatue’s general partner Lucas Swished added: “We were then impressed by how the platform was able to distill something so overwhelming into a tool anyone can use to take global employment from dream to reality.”

The future for Deel

Founded in 2019, Deel has experienced impressive growth over the past two years. It has increased its number of employees from four to 400, and it now works with 4500 customers across 150 countries to hire and manage distributed teams of employees and contractors.

But what does the future hold for Deel?

In a statement, Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz noted: “The way people work is fundamentally changing. And it’s never going back.

“We founded Deel because we didn’t want hiring or payments to prevent businesses from building the best global teams and finding the best global talent.

“We’re going to keep challenging the norms of how companies operate and continue building tools that shape the future of work.”

To achieve this, Deel is going to launch a premium version of its product “to further protect companies against misclassification risks”, as well as offer global Payroll and its open API, according to Bouziz’s blogpost announcing the funding round.

Andreesen Horowitz general partner Anish Acharya concluded: “We’ve been on board with Deel since the start and seen how they transformed and developed tools in record time to help create a better experience for businesses and their teams,.

“The future is bright for Deel, but even brighter for the international teams they’re helping unlock across the globe.”