Less than a year after its last financing round, Israeli payroll solutions company Papaya Global today announced the closing of a $40 million financing round led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Workday Ventures, Access Industries (via its Israeli vehicle Claltech), and all existing investors: Insight Venture Partners, Bessemer Ventures Partners, New Era Ventures, Group 11, and Dynamic Loop. The new funding brings total investment in the company to $95 million.
Papaya Global CEO Eynat Guez told "Globes," "Raising the funds is for future strategy, and we are able to choose the world's best investors." Guez founded the company in 2016 with Ruben Drong and Ofer Herman.
She added, "I tell my investors that you cannot teach me about payroll but I've a lot to learn about how to take a company and grow it and take it public. It's always easy to be smarter in retrospect but we don't want to say in another year that the market is in recession and nobody is raising money and it's a shame that we didn't raise money. In such a situation companies can go into a spin and move from growth to survival. If we can avoid a bad time then why not?"
Guez says that Papaya had forecast tripling revenue in 2020 but this was cut to 1.5 because of Covid-19. "We will finish the year with more than $20 million revenue. One of the amazing things that has happened is that we have succeeded with remote sales, which once seemed impossible. It surprised us that this worked."
The company's workforce has grown this year from 100-110 to about 150 and today 10 new employees were hired in Austin from a startup that closed down.
"Payroll is an exciting industry and relevant to any enterprise, especially those that intend to expand internationally," she says. "However, it is painfully complex to manage payroll in different countries with multiple suppliers while maintaining a grasp of the nuances of local compliance and particular local payroll components. These pain points are experienced by companies of all sizes."
While offering an exceptional UI experience for its clients, Papaya’s platform creates an automated process to solve the complexity of payroll data management. It meets the highest privacy standards and security regulations (GDPR, ISO, SOC) and increases employee engagement within organizations.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 30, 2020
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2020