Cercli, the unified contemporary platform for MENA firms to hire, manage, and pay their global workforce, raised $4 million in a seed round led by Silicon Valley-based Afore Capital. This milestone deal marks Afore’s MENA debut with $150 million fund III backing.
Cercli’s seed round included COTU Ventures, Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Karim Atiyeh (Ramp), Sebastian Mejia (Rappi), Tony Dong (Rippling), Tony Jamous (Oyster), Allison Pickens, and the founders and executives of Kitopi, Careem, and other MENA-based unicorns.
They wants to alter how businesses manage their workers through one platform with a $2 billion payroll market potential in MENA and high compliance expenses owing to human error.
Cercli’s founders Akeed Azmi and David Reche built and managed teams at Kitopi and Careem, two of the region’s largest unicorns, and saw the need for a comprehensive solution to manage a hypergrowing multinational workforce.
Spreadsheets and fragmented legacy software for particular tasks have caused fraud, data privacy, payroll problems, delays, and other issues for regional businesses. Cercli replaces disparate back-office systems with a single platform to ensure data accuracy and a source of truth for companies’ greatest asset—their people.
Cercli has paid out over $23 million in client employee salaries in 31 countries since launching in 2024, growing 25% monthly.
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“The cost of workforce-related compliance is one of the biggest challenges for C-suite executives across our region. We built Cercli to replace multiple isolated systems as the singular modern payroll and employee data platform, empowering businesses to manage their local payroll, remote contractors, employer of record, HR, onboarding and more. Today, we are excited to welcome globally renowned investors whose experience in supporting early-stage companies will propel our growth across our core markets and adjacent product SKUs,” said Akeed Azmi, co-founder, Cercli.
Cercli’s platform is created and designed with the needs of the customer in mind, and it has been localized to comply with labor law modifications and market-specific regulatory adjustments.
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The technological team of the company has developed software connections for HR, financial, accounting, legal, and IT applications. This enables customers to easily connect into the Cercli platform, which serves as their main source of truth.
“At Cercli, Akeed and David are building to solve one of the region’s largest challenges—managing a global workforce while meeting compliance requirements. This investment is reflective of our recognition of the massive untapped potential of the MENA region and the possibilities that game-changing founders are enabling here. In just a few months, Cercli has not only assembled a solid team of builders and operators but has attracted marquee customers as well,” said Anamitra Banerji, co-founder and managing partner of Afore Capital.
Global behemoths like Microsoft, ADP, and Accenture, as well as local startups like Kitopi and Careem, have drawn top talent to Cercli from all over the world. Cercli is an engineering and product-focused organization that employs 80% of its workforce to create its products horizontally across several markets and product verticals.
About Cercli
Cercli is MENA’s modern payroll and employee data platform. MENA enterprises still manually manage payroll, personnel data, papers, onboarding checklists, and more. Spreadsheets, legacy business solutions, and outdated HR solutions lead to human mistake, fraud, inadequate compliance, poor transparency, and more.
