Group 11 Joins Papaya Global as a Strategic Investor

Global payroll and payment platform Papaya Global Ltd. announced Monday that Group 11, a leading, U.S.-based fintech VC led by Dovi Frances, has joined the company’s investors.

The investment was carried out through the purchase of secondary stock valued at $5 million from existing shareholders. Last October, Papaya Global raised $45 million in a Series A funding round led by Insight Partners, and participated by Bessemer Venture Partners and existing investors New Era Capital Partners and Dynamic Loop Capital (Sir Ronald Cohen’s private investment fund). Dovi Frances will join the company’s board of directors.

Papaya Global was founded by Eynat Guez, Ofer Herman, and Ruben Drong and is active in the field of global payroll management.

“Global Payroll is an exciting industry that is relevant to each one of us as employees and to any organization and industry, especially those planning global expansion,” Eynat Guez said in a statement. “At the same time, the global payroll process is extremely complicated. It requires working with multiple local suppliers, sorting through all types of reporting styles, and dealing with the nuances of local compliance. Most organizations, big and small, still manage payroll manually, requiring payroll managers to work five times harder when calculating the salary of a global employee.”

The worldwide coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis exposed global companies’ challenges with managing their payroll -- dependency on local suppliers, inaccessibility to locally managed employee information and lack of familiarity with the various regional labor regulations that were constantly being changed by local governments.

Papaya’s platform is used by a wide variety of globally-focused companies that are at different stages of developments, from small, growth-stage startups to established brands like Checkmarx, Fiverr, Wix, Microsoft, CyberArk, and others.

After a period of rapid expansion, Papaya Global is now one of the largest software companies to provide workforce, payments, and payroll management solutions, operating a SaaS model. Its network supports all types of global workers (payroll, EoR, and contractors) in over 100 countries.

“Papaya Global solves the challenges of global payroll, which has been managed manually and inefficiently until now, through full automation and a single user interface. The Papaya Global business model reflects Group 11’s philosophy of investing in fintech companies that redefine their category by shattering and automating old work paradigms in multi-billion dollar markets, such as the global payroll market,” said Dovi Frances, founding partner of Group 11. “We are proud to join this journey with Eynat Guez and her management team and commit to making Papaya Global the largest global payroll company in the world.

“In spite of the world crisis, Papaya has maintained its exceptional growth. We’re happy to join leading, strategic investors to support our vision in turning global payroll into a full financial system with the ability to support real-time management and decision-making capability,” Frances added. “We’re happy to join leading, strategic investors to support our vision in turning global payroll into a full financial system with the ability to support real-time management and decision-making capability.”

Papaya’s decentralized team works out of offices in Tel Aviv, New York, San Francisco, and Melbourne with plans to triple its growth this year in terms of clients, revenues, and employees globally.

Frances’s investment is out of Group 11’s fourth fund that is currently completing a $75 million raise. One of the fund’s anchor investors is Roi Kadosh’s Hachshara Insurance Company LTD., which invested a very substantial sum in the fund.