In a region long defined by fragmented enterprise systems, outdated compliance tools, and HR software that rarely talks to finance, Cercli is building a unified alternative for MENA businesses with AI at its core.
The Dubai-based startup, founded by ex-Careem operators Akeed Azmi and David Reche, has announced an oversubscribed $12 million Series A round led by European VC Picus Capital.
Cercli today looks slightly different from the company that raised a $4 million seed round last year. It is rebuilding a Rippling-like stack for the MENA region, but making it AI-native from the ground up.
Over the past year, that bet has paid off. The company says it has scaled revenue more than 10x and now processes over $100 million in payroll annually for multiple businesses across 50 countries.
But in a crowded HR-tech market—where dozens of startups such as Deel and Remote, alongside incumbents like SAP and Oracle, already promise everything from cross-border payments to payroll — why does the market need another HR tech player? CEO Azmi hopes its AI-first rebuild may be the edge that sets it apart.
Azmi started Cercli to help enterprises with basic people operations, an issue he and Reche noticed at their previous employers, Careem and Kitopi, two of MENA’s best-known unicorns.
With payroll spread across multiple systems and compliance varying by region, the first version of Cercli focused on a platform that consolidated human resources management, payroll, and compliance for MENA-based companies operating globally.
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But Azmi says it envisioned a bigger opportunity if it baked in AI. So, over the past three months, Azmi says the company has rewritten its entire payroll engine to be multi-country and agent-compatible, enabling it to scale more efficiently across global jurisdictions.
“The legacy systems of the last 20 years—your SAPs, Oracles, Workdays—they were built for on-prem and the cloud. Now we’re entering an AI-native world,” Azmi said in an interview with TechCru …