YC alum Cercli has raised an oversubscribed $12 million Series A to support the development and scale of its AI-native back-office suite for the Middle East and North Africa. Founded by former operators Akeed Azmi and David Reche, the Dubai-based startup claims to be a much simpler, single solution — à la Rippling — purpose-built for MENA’s complicated payroll, compliance, and people operations.
The investment is led by European investor Picus Capital, the first from the firm in the region, with Knollwood Investment Advisory along with existing backers Y Combinator, Afore Capital, and COTU Ventures also participating. The capital will be used to expand the product and go-to-market, with Cercli targeting what it estimates is a $5.8 billion regional HR software opportunity.
An AI-native HR stack tailored for MENA’s complex needs
Cercli is rebuilding the HR and finance data layer for companies that work across multiple geographies, currencies, and labor codes. In the past quarter, the startup re-architected its payroll engine to go multi-country and be agent-aware so that automated compliance checks, anomaly detection, and speedy scaling in new markets can happen without writing fresh code for every single country.
The company took the same framework to recruiting. The product’s agent-driven capabilities bring ranked candidate lists to the surface, pull from internal datasets, and run background logic on fit and eligibility — workflows that typically require a recruiter and an HR generalist to manage across different systems.
It’s worth mentioning that Cercli operates its books on the same stack. Custom treasury/reconciliation agents automate payout matching and ledger integrity, which the team attributes to their steady 21% month-over-month revenue growth while closing the round. Revenue, the 14-person startup says, has increased more than 10x in the past year and it now processes at least $100 million in annual payroll for businesses operating in 50 countries.
How fast Cercli can get them into the field is a big part of its value proposition. The upshot is that onboarding tends to be complete in two or three days — compared to the weeks or months often required by legacy suites — thanks to its AI layer ingesting existing data, mapping local rules, and confirming compliance settings upfront, per the company.
Why investors leaned in on Cercli’s AI HR vision
Picus Capital has previous experience in HR tech, as with its portfolio of companies Personio, Multiplier, Deel, Maki, and JetHR. The firm sees Cercli as a local version of a successful global playbook: consolidate HR, payroll, and adjacent workflows on one data model before compounding value by automating the edge cases that legacy vendors fail to support.
The oversubscription mirrors strong demand from the region’s corporates for consolidation. Most finance and HR teams in MENA still switch between point solutions for expenses, payroll, and recruiting. One AI-native platform that governs data lineage and compliance — and cuts down on license sprawl — provides a clear ROI story for CFOs and CHROs.
Competition and market dynamics in MENA HR software
The field for HR tech is crowded, with global players like SAP and Oracle as well as newer entrants including Rippling, Deel, Remote, and BambooHR. But MENA markets present some wrinkles of their own, such as mandatory file submissions for the Wage Protection System in the Gulf, end-of-service gratuity calculations, Arabic–English documentation requirements, and country-specific benefits, tax brackets, and social insurance rules. Such complexities frequently lead companies to tweak generic software or cobble together multiple tools.
Cercli’s wager is that an AI-first architecture can adapt to rule changes and regional differences faster than template-based systems. For instance, an agent might flag a problem tied to tenure thresholds in how gratuities accrue, reconcile it against payroll runs, and auto-generate the supporting documentation for auditors — activities that usually land on top of stretched HR and finance squads. Even before coronavirus-related disruption, regional regulators — such as the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation in the UAE or labor authorities in Saudi Arabia — had been increasing their focus on digital payroll enforcement, emphasizing a need for strong, automated compliance solutions.
Traction, customers, and differentiation
Cercli’s customers include startups and multinationals. Wins for the company include clients such as Vision Bank, the Global Climate Finance Centre, Huspy, Lean Technologies, and Ziina — companies that require cross-border payroll, contractor management, and localized compliance but don’t want to lose central control. Whether that’s including the finance, HR, and recruiting teams in the same source of truth (common with what I’d already liked about Rippling) while setting up faster is, at its core, what Rippling is doing differently over a market where it can feel like many-in-one players still win because everything isn’t yet connected.
The founders’ operator pedigree (acquired at regional unicorns Careem and Kitopi) has also driven product decisions, especially around back-office workflows that break at scale.
By embedding the AI layer into the data model below, rather than adding it as an afterthought, Cercli hopes to lower the support requirements and time-to-value for customers that are going global.
What comes next as Cercli expands its AI HR suite
With new capital, Cercli wants to grow its product surface beyond HR and payroll into expenses, onboarding, identity, and IT provisioning to help consolidate the back office. The emphasis is on MENA-first design — integrating with regional banking rails, government systems, and audit workflows — and seamlessly integrating with global hiring companies where they are hiring across the world.
Should the company be able to maintain its growth, there is a major reward. Companies in the region are going through technological transformation to comply with stricter labor and finance controls. This is also reflected in government programs such as wage protection initiatives in the GCC. The math for buyers is simple: less vendor sprawl, quicker setup, and automated compliance. For Cercli, the pressure will be in whether it can keep its speed and accuracy as it expands to more countries and product lines — a test of execution that has separated winners in this category throughout the world.
