Deel acquires African HRTech company PaySpace
Global payroll platform Deel has acquired Johannesburg-based HRTech startup PaySpace, expanding its presence in Africa.
San Francisco-based HR and payroll company Deel has acquired PaySpace, a South African HRTech company, for an undisclosed sum. PaySpace, with over two decades of experience in payroll tech, has served over 14,000 businesses–including Heineken, Coca-Cola Beverages, and Puma Sports—across four continents: Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America.
Alongside acquiring PaySpace, Deel announced that it has organically reached $500 million in annual recurring revenue within five years of its founding.
"Global payroll is hard to do and critical to get right. As a company, you want assurances you can pay your teams on time, compliantly, anywhere in the world," says Deel co-founder and CEO Alex Bouaziz. "PaySpace’s single-platform payroll expertise and breadth of coverage, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, combined with PayGroup's presence in APAC, will give Deel customers the reach they need to grow their businesses globally. Our long-term vision is to be the most comprehensive payroll system in the world."
The acquisition of PaySpace arguably makes Deel the first global payroll and Employer of Record (EOR) company with a full-stack payroll engine localised in 50 countries and integrated into its core offering.
In 2023, Deel processed over $7 billion in payroll for its more than 20,000 clients—including BBC, Klarna, Coinbase, Shopify and Reddit—across 150+ countries. The company has secured at least $500 million in funding and boasts a current valuation of $12 billion.
Meanwhile, Johannesburg-based PaySpace, founded in 2007 by three brothers Bruce, Clyde and Warren Clark, alongside George Karageorgiades, has been growing by over 30% annually, according to managing director Sandra Crous.
"We were their customer, running payroll in 10 countries using PaySpace," Bouaziz told TechCrunch. "Our internal team was dying to acquire them and have the ability to do on the spot calculations. Theirs is one of the best technologies we’ve ever seen … We had to do a lot of convincing."
