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HR and payroll unicorn Deel made its third buy of the year today with its acquisition of London-based Hofy. Hofy provides IT equipment and management for remote hires.
The buy builds on an existing partnership between the two firms, which included Hofy providing equipment for Deel’s 4,000 plus employees worldwide.
“Over the past two and a half years we’ve run our fully remote, global team on Hofy — we’ve shipped an estimated 5,000 devices to 98 countries,” Deel co-founder and CEO Alex Bouaziz told Reworked. “In our experience, as both a customer and partner, no one else has the global scale, expertise or customer service that Hofy does. It’s one of the main reasons we decided to look into deepening our relationship further than a partnership.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
From Hofy to Deel IT
As part of the announcement, Deel shared plans to launch Deel IT later this year, based on the integration of Hofy into its platform. Deel IT will add software provisioning, app access management and integration with mobile device management and identity tools to the hardware provisioning and IT management Hofy provides.
Deel IT will include a fully integrated software support desk, including worker onboarding and customer support at the time of launch. The company plans to add an integration with its existing L&D platform, Deel Engage, to expand the learning offerings down the line.
Deel IT will work much as Hofy currently does. Customers can log into the platform to add new team members who need equipment with a guaranteed delivery time of 10 business days. Deel IT will also integrate with the big players in HRIS, including Workday and Hibob, to automate the process from delivery to recovery and offboarding.
“The goal is to be a full IT stack for customers, making Deel even more of a one-stop-shop for scaling your business globally,” said Bouaziz.
The Growing Relationship Between IT and HR
On a recent episode of Reworked TV’s Three Dots, PG&E’s head of digital workplace, Spencer Mains, discussed the growing importance of IT provisioning in the onboarding experience.
“[The technology side of onboarding is] becoming increasingly relevant over time. So maybe 25 years ago, when it wasn't quite as relevant, it was perfectly OK to not receive your computer equipment for a few weeks, and maybe your phone didn't need to be activated right away, because you're going to be in a lot of meetings anyway. That's not the case anymore. And it's particularly relevant post COVID,” said Mains.
The sentiment is one Deel’s Bouaziz echoed: “It’s clear global hiring is here to stay. And as a result, both HR and IT leaders will continue to see the expansion of responsibilities for their roles. Looking ahead, those roles will continue to lean on each other to provide a smooth, efficient and happy onboarding and management process for their workforces.”
He explained the acquisition as a natural result of this growing partnership.
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Deel’s Growing Momentum
Today’s buy follows Deel’s February acquisition of employee engagement platform Zavvy and March buy of Payspace. The company, now valued at over $12 billion, has been moving quickly to build its offerings through mergers and acquisitions since 2021. The Hofy buy will be its eighth.
The founding stories of the two companies share some common throughlines. When Bouaziz founded Deel with Shuo Wang and Ofer Simon in 2019, the three were looking to solve the difficulties they’d experienced hiring international workers. Hofy emerged in 2020 as a direct response to the pandemic, when co-founders Sami Bouremoum and Michael Ginzo launched the IT provisioner to support the move to work from home and specifically, the challenges of provisioning for an increasingly dispersed global workforce.
Deel currently claims over 35,000 customers worldwide.
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