In a region long defined by fragmented enterprise systems, outdated compliance tools, and HR software that rarely connects with finance, Cercli is building a unified alternative for MENA businesses with artificial intelligence at its core.
The Dubai-based startup was founded by ex-Careem operators Akeed Azmi and David Reche. It has announced an oversubscribed twelve million dollar Series A funding round led by the European venture capital firm Picus Capital.
Cercli today looks different from the company that raised a four million dollar seed round last year. It is rebuilding a comprehensive business operations stack for the MENA region, but is 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 ten times and now processes over one hundred million dollars in payroll annually for multiple businesses across fifty countries.
But in a crowded HR technology market, where dozens of startups and established companies already promise everything from cross-border payments to payroll, why does the market need another player? Chief Executive Officer 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 the region’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.
But Azmi says the company envisioned a bigger opportunity if it baked in artificial intelligence. So, over the past three months, 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 twenty years were built for on-premise and cloud computing. Now the industry is entering an AI-native world. The company did not want to just integrate AI; it wanted to rethink the entire stack for how people and automated agents work together.
It has also done the same to its recruitment module. Cercli now offers agent-driven features that can surface candidate lists, source from internal datasets, and run background logic on hiring fit. Its own internal operations run on AI, as the company uses custom-built treasury and reconciliation agents to manage its own finances and accounting. That is how the fourteen-person team closed its Series A while maintaining a twenty-one percent month-to-month revenue growth rate.
Beyond AI, the founder believes Cercli’s other strength lies in consolidation. Although plenty of multi-module HR competitors exist, MENA companies are often stitching their back office together from separate point solutions. A company might use different products for expense management, payroll, or recruiting. Customers are asking for everything in one place, and being AI-native allows the company to build that unified experience far more quickly.
Azmi said Cercli’s AI-native architecture lets it onboard customers quickly as well. Setup can occur in two to three days, compared to several months typical with legacy systems. This has helped the two-year-old HR technology startup win clients from startups to multinationals, including Vision Bank, the Global Climate Finance Centre, Huspy, Lean Technologies, and Ziina.
Cercli is also the first MENA investment for Picus Capital. This firm has backed other global HR companies. Other investors who participated in this Series A round include Knollwood Investment Advisory as well as existing investors Y Combinator, Afore Capital, and COTU Ventures.
As part of the investment, the company plans to build new AI-native products and work on gaining more market share in the five point eight billion dollar HR software opportunity in the MENA region. The lead investor stated that they have seen this business model succeed globally within their portfolio and are excited to back Cercli as they continue to grow market share through new customers and product launches.