Alex Bouaziz kept the first year of Deel to himself for six years. In October 2025, when the company announced a $300 million round at a $17.3 billion valuation, he posted the version he had been avoiding. He and his co-founder Shuo Wang had started about six years earlier and, in his words, struggled to even make $10K. He said he had never shared it before because of how embarrassing the start was.

The two met at MIT in 2013 and then spent years on separate things. Alex had co-founded a collaborative video app called Lifeslice and after that an early stage fund, Sarona Ventures. Shuo had built a robotics company and sold it to iRobot. In 2018 they started talking about building something together, prompted by friends with international backgrounds who had gone home and could not find work that matched what they could do. Both of them had also tried to hire and pay people abroad at their earlier companies and hit the same wall every time: transfers that took weeks, forms that needed a lawyer, and tax rules that changed at every border.

The first product was not what Deel sells now. It was an escrow platform aimed at freelancers who deliver work and then get ghosted. Money would be locked up front and released automatically as milestones were completed. They pitched it to freelancers on Reddit. Nobody cared. Alex's summary of why is the most useful sentence in the whole account: contractors do not choose payment methods, clients do. They had built for the side of the transaction with no spending power.

What followed he calls pivot hell. Alex turned himself into a collection agency, sending legal letters to companies that had not paid freelancers using the product. One of those letters recovered $7,000 of a $15,000 invoice, and the freelancer handed him $1,000 for it. At the time it felt like the breakthrough. They thought they had found product market fit. Then they never collected another dollar. It is a clean example of how one transaction can be mistaken for a business.

The thing that actually worked came from a customer they were not designing for. A batchmate in the same Y Combinator group, from Sunsama, was using the escrow tool sideways. He said he liked tying contracts to payments so money moved as work got done, and that he was getting contracts out of the box and a way to pay someone internationally. That was three products described inside one sentence of feedback. They stopped defending the escrow idea and rebuilt around contracts.

The dates here are unusually clean because Alex posted in real time. Y Combinator's winter 2019 batch ran from January to demo day on 18 March 2019, and on 19 March he posted that Deel had been named one of TechCrunch's top ten startups from that demo day. Ten days before it, by his own count, they shipped the contracts product. By demo day they had 290 contractors on the platform and $5,000 in monthly revenue. The roughly seventy days in this record run from the January batch start to that demo day. Shuo remembers the size of those accounts precisely: their second paying client, and the biggest one they had at the time, was worth $800 a year.

None of the growth after that came from a strategy document. Alex says he kept hundreds of customers on WhatsApp and Slack and asked them what was hurting, and he still does it. In July 2026 he was still publicly offering any frustrated Deel customer his WhatsApp number. Those conversations produced the next two products. Employer of record, where Deel puts a worker on its own payroll for the client and handles compliance, became a business he puts above $300 million ARR. Payroll, which calculates and remits tax and net salary in each country, he puts above $150 million. The contracts product they rebuilt in ten days topped $100 million on its own. Their first hundred customers, he and Shuo both say, came straight out of the Y Combinator community, interviewed one by one.

In June 2025 Alex and Shuo published a note on the Deel blog saying the company had reached a $1 billion revenue run rate in just over six years, with 35,000 customers, 1.25 million workers in more than 150 countries, close to three years of profitability and 75 percent year on year revenue growth. In the October 2025 post he added that September had been the first month Deel billed more than $100 million. He closed with the line worth keeping: all good things start small and shaky.