35-year-old woman from Northeast China achieves 120 billion.

The investment circle was shaken. The investment community has learned that the global HR technology giant Deel announced a $300 million (approximately 2.1 billion RMB) Series E financing, with Ribbit Capital, Coatue, and A16Z participating. The company’s valuation has risen to $17.3 billion (approximately 120 billion RMB). Deel was founded by Wang Shuo, a post-90s entrepreneur—born and raised in Northeast China, later admitted to MIT, then dropped out of her master’s program and returned to Beijing to start a business. With her keen insight into the remote work trend, she founded Deel in early 2019, quickly rising to prominence. Unknowingly, the post-90s generation is wielding technology as its blade and taking the global stage. Northeast Girl Creates a Super Unicorn In 1990, Wang Shuo was born in Shenyang, Liaoning. She once recalled her upbringing—her family ran a motorcycle export business, and at age 16, she traveled overseas with her mother. She attended classes during the day, and at night often drove forklifts to help move vehicles, also selling scooters at the flea market on weekends. This experience planted the seeds for her future entrepreneurship—not empty talk about business models, but facing the real-world operational logic. Later, Wang Shuo was admitted to MIT, majoring in mechanical engineering and pursuing a master’s degree. However, after a year of graduate study, she decided to drop out because the coursework could not satisfy her desire for hands-on practice and innovation. In 2015, she returned to Beijing and founded Aeris with classmates, serving as co-founder and CTO. The company’s main business was air purifiers. Six years later, the company was sold for $100 million to the robot firm iRobot. However, Wang Shuo left Aeris at the end of 2018, determined to start another venture. At that time, remote work was still a niche trend, but she keenly identified the massive pain points behind globalized employment. “There were two signals that made me certain change was coming,” Wang Shuo recalled in an interview. “One was seeing the astonishing speed at which Alipay and WeChat Pay rolled out in China, while overseas payments remained a major pain; two was discovering that multinational companies had begun trying hybrid work arrangements, with ever-expanding collaboration tools, but cross-border payroll and compliant hiring were still extremely complicated.” So, together with MIT alumni Alex Bouaziz, she officially launched Deel in 2019—a SaaS platform designed to simplify global hiring processes. The initial model was simple, starting with “cross-currency payroll payments,” Deel launched an online payment platform. The goal: to enable a New York company to pay a Singapore designer’s salary as easily as paying a local employee. Wang Shuo also took detours. At first, they planned to start with freelancer C-side users, but results were unsatisfactory, and sometimes they even had to help people recover pay, barely earning $10,000. Soon the company pivoted to B2B, with Wang Shuo spending six weeks interviewing over 200 companies, redesigning the product to focus on cross-border payments and localized contracts. This approach worked, and Deel quickly acquired a large number of corporate customers. Simply put, traditional multinational recruitment and payroll often require companies to connect with local service providers in different countries, leading to difficulties in cross-region salary management and accounting. Even large providers such as ADP and SAP rely on third-party outsourcing networks. Deel integrates these fragmented manual operations into automated software, providing a one-stop solution for remote onboarding, data entry, compliance, tax filing, and more, saving companies enormous energy researching complex local policies. Everything comes down to opportunity. The sudden outbreak of the pandemic triggered explosive demand for remote work. Deel seized the opportunity, with its business surging. “The speed of Deel drives continuous momentum; we never put off until tomorrow what can be done today,” said Wang Shuo. On the first day of founding, they set their sight globally, laying out plans for the Asia Pacific and Latin America regions early—when the market changed, they could quickly readjust. From 2020 to 2021, annual revenue soared from $4 million to $54 million, a 13-fold increase. By 2023, revenue broke the $500 million mark, making Deel one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history. Now, Deel annually processes $22 billion in payroll for 37,000 business clients in 150 countries. By early this year, annual recurring revenue has exceeded $1 billion. Some say special times made Deel what it is today. But as the saying goes, opportunity always favors the prepared. A Valuation of 120 Billion RMB, Backed by a Crowd of VC/PE To date, Deel has amassed a long list of investors. Back in 2019 when it was founded, Y Combinator invested $150,000 in Deel at a $2.1 million valuation. That same year, Deel completed a $3.85 million seed round, with investors including Weekend Fund, Soma Capital, Quiet Capital, legendary Silicon Valley investor Elad Gil, Avichal Garg, etc. In the years since, Deel has maintained a financing rhythm of at least once per year. In 2020, Deel announced successively a $14 million Series A led by A16z, and a $30 million Series B led by Spark Capital, at which point the valuation was $60 million. A16z partner Anish Acharya recalls his first encounter with Deel: the company had only ten people but grand ambitions. “Now, Wang Shuo and her co-founder continue to make Deel the infrastructure for global work. Their product’s speed and early investment in AI make it easier for clients worldwide to use and accept.” The following April, Deel announced a $156 million Series C led by YC, with existing investors A16z and Spark Capital participating. This round also included the participation of Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, former Amazon executive Jeff Wilke, among others. Thus, this three-year-old company entered the unicorn ranks with a valuation of $1.25 billion. Shortly after, Deel completed a $425 million Series D, reaching a valuation of $5.5 billion. This round was led by Coatue, with over 30 investors including Altimeter Capital, A16Z, YC, Spark Capital, Greenbay Ventures, Neo, and more. The previous round, completed in 2022, was $50 million at a valuation of $12 billion, led by the Emerson Fund founded by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’s widow. Most recently, Deel announced a $300 million Series E financing with Ribbit Capital, Coatue and A16Z participating, pushing the company’s valuation to $17.3 billion. “Since Deel was founded, we’ve been closely following it,” said Ribbit founder Micky Malka. “In such a complex field, it’s hard to find another company that has reached this scale in five years; the company’s revenue reflects the value of its services.” This June, according to “New Fortune” Magazine, 35-year-old Wang Shuo ranked on China’s post-90s rich list with a net worth of 8.6 billion RMB. “We’re just getting started,” Wang Shuo wrote on the Deel website. “Although we’ve covered some ground, every milestone and every new customer reminds us how much farther we still have to go.” Chinese Post-90s Are Heading Global Through Wang Shuo, we can see that the new generation of entrepreneurs is sweeping the globe with unstoppable momentum. Looking domestically, global vision and technological innovation have become key words for post-90s entrepreneurs. We must mention Liu Jingkang of Insta360. This June, Insta360 was officially listed on the A-share market, and Liu became the youngest founding CEO to ring the bell on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board. After several fluctuations, the company’s market cap once exceeded 140 billion RMB. To date, Insta360’s market cap remains over 100 billion RMB. Notably, from day one Liu set his sights globally, with overseas sales at times accounting for 80%, making Insta360 another symbol of “Made in China.” Yushu Technology also has a post-90s founder. Wang Xingxing, who earned his bachelor’s at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University and master’s at Shanghai University, was adept at inventions from a young age. In college at age 19, Wang built his first robot. When he received his first investment, he was only 26. Today, his company Yushu Technology has gathered a long team of investors. There’s also Zhiyuan Robotics, with another post-90s founder—Bilibili’s influencer Zhi Hui Jun (Peng Zhihui), who has 2.7 million followers. With both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, he was selected for Huawei’s “Genius Youth Program.” Until the end of 2022, he announced his resignation from Huawei to pursue his own dreams in robotics entrepreneurship. Looking around, there are many more such faces: Yang Zhilin of Dark Side of the Moon, Zhang Junbin of Yuanjing Intelligence, Wang He of Galaxy Universal, Zeng Guoyang of Mianbi Intelligence, Hu Yuanming of Meshy… Their faces are still youthful, but with knowledge and technology, they have founded amazing companies from scratch. As Cornerstone Capital chairman Zhang Wei summarized: “They grew up in an era of economic take-off and global embrace, more confident, more global-minded, more creative, rebellious, and willing to take on challenges. Ambitious, dreaming of changing the world and building great products.” If the previous generation of entrepreneurs excelled at business development and sales, these young founders today are more focused on technology. Undeniably, they are lucky to be standing on the cusp of technological breakthroughs and growing rapidly. Chase the sun and stars, pick the stars by hand. The global journey of the post-90s generation has just begun. Author: Wang Lu, Source: Investment Community, Original Title: “35-year-old Northeast Girl Builds a 120 Billion Business” Risk Warning and Disclaimer There are risks in the market; invest with caution. This article does not constitute personal investment advice, nor does it take into account the specific investment goals, financial situation, or needs of individual users. Users should consider whether any opinions, views, or conclusions in this article are appropriate for their individual circumstances. Investment decisions made based on this article are at your own risk.