ICYMI: Out of 50K+ Global Startups, 5 Won The $1M Pitch
Inside Deel’s Pitch Grand Finale
Brought to you by:
Brex—The intelligent finance platform: cards, expenses, travel, bill pay, banking—wrapped into a high-performance stack. Built for scale. Visit → brex.com/sourcery
ICYMI: Inside Deel’s Pitch Grand Finale
Five Startups, +50,000 Applications, & a $1M Bet on Borderless Founders
How a global tournament backed by a16z, J.P. Morgan, and Citigroup is rewriting the early-stage funding playbook, and what it signals about the launch of Deel Ventures.
On May 18, the Pavillon Vendôme in Paris hosted what might be the most geographically diverse seed-stage demo day of the year. 80 founders, drawn from a global field of more than 50,000 applicants, took the stage at the Grand Finale of The Pitch by Deel. By the end of the day, 5 had been selected to enter investment discussions with Deel’s venture capital partner network, with up to $1 million per company on the line.
The winners: Zeely AI (Ukraine), Smart Bricks (US & UAE), nybl (UAE), Acceler8 (US), and Alpic (France). They span advertising AI, real estate intelligence, physics-informed industrial AI, workforce planning, and infrastructure for the Model Context Protocol, a portfolio that says as much about where seed-stage innovation is heading as it does about Deel’s investment thesis.
Why This Competition Comes From Deel, Specifically
To understand why Deel is the company running a tournament built around borderless founders, you have to look at how Deel itself was built.
Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang met at MIT in 2013 and founded Deel in 2019, joining Y Combinator that same year. The founding insight came out of their own pain: in earlier ventures, both ran into the same wall when trying to hire international talent. The compliance, payroll, and entity infrastructure simply didn’t exist in a usable form. Deel was the answer they wished had been on the shelf.
What followed was one of the fastest scale-up stories in SaaS history:
a16z led the $14 million Series A in 2020
Spark Capital led a $48 million Series B months later
By April 2021, a $156 million Series C made Deel a unicorn
Coatue & DST Global then led a $425 million Series D in October 2021
Emerson Collective came in at a $12 billion valuation in 2022
October 2025, Ribbit Capital led a $300 million round at a $17.3 billion valuation, with a16z, Coatue, General Catalyst, & Green Bay Ventures participating
Now they’re scaling faster than ever, last reported at over $1.4B in ARR. (ehem, this might already be dated.. watch our interview with Alex)
But the operational story is the more interesting one. Deel didn’t internationalize after building a US base. It was global from day one. Forbes famously described a five-person “Navy SEAL” team that traveled country to country incorporating local entities. Today, Deel owns roughly 250 entities globally, runs in-house, in-country payroll teams in 130+ countries, and serves 40,000+ customers across 150+ countries. It is, mechanically, the most distributed HR and payroll company in the world.
That history matters when reading The Pitch. Deel isn’t a US firm dabbling in international sourcing. It is a company whose entire infrastructure is purpose-built for the geographic problem the competition is trying to solve.
The Tournament That Funnels 50,000 to 5
The Pitch was built around a simple premise: capital is concentrated in too few zip codes. Deel’s solution was to run a structured global tournament rather than rely on the warm-intro economy that dominates traditional seed investing.
The structure was unusually compressed. Applications opened in February 2026, and the entire competition wrapped in roughly three months, far shorter than the typical seed fundraising cycle. Seven regional finals were held across Tel Aviv, Dubai, Singapore, New York, London, Berlin, and Paris between March and May, each producing a cohort of regional winners who received a $50,000 SAFE investment and an invitation to Paris.
By the time the field narrowed to the Grand Finale, only 0.1% of applicants remained, a selection rate Deel has publicly compared favorably against top accelerators. Evaluation combined an AI-powered screening system with human expert review, scoring founders on product strength, market opportunity, team capability, traction, and scalability.
The Judges and the Money Behind Them
What gives The Pitch its weight isn’t just the size of the prize pool. It’s the caliber of investors Deel pulled into the room. The Paris judging panel included partners from a16z, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, and AltaIR Capital, with J.P. Morgan serving as presenting sponsor across the competition. Earlier regional rounds drew in figures including Charles Gorintin (Alan), Cyril Chiche (Lydia), Jean-Claude Le Grand (L’Oréal), Elise Stern (Eurazeo), Jonathan Userovici (Headline), Cécile Mayer Lévi (Tikehau Capital), and Deel’s Executive Chairman & Chief Strategy Officer Philippe Bouaziz.
Deel’s broader partner network for the competition reads like a who’s-who of global tech and finance: a16z, Google, Stripe, J.P. Morgan, Mubadala, Ribbit Ventures, dLocal, Orrick, and Prodware, among others. Several of these names, notably a16z and Ribbit, are also investors in Deel itself, an alignment that gives the competition a built-in coalition of capital with skin in Deel’s broader thesis.
Anish Acharya, the a16z general partner who led Deel’s Series A back in 2020, sat on the Grand Finale panel. His take on the day:
“What struck me about The Pitch was the depth of global talent in the room. Rigorous selection at this scale is rare, & the founders on that stage had so many of the qualities we look for at seed. We’re excited to keep the conversations going.”
That last line matters. The competition’s prize isn’t a check that lands in a bank account on stage. It’s structured introductions to a vetted investor network, with Deel actively shepherding each founder through the conversations.
The Five Finalists & AI
The selected companies share a common thread: they are infrastructure plays, building rails for industries that are about to get reshaped by AI.
Zeely AI (Ukraine). Founded by Dmytro Samoiliuk, Alina Bondarenko, and Yaroslav Samoiliuk. An AI marketing intelligence platform that generates ads, runs campaigns automatically, and scales creative production for SMBs, a segment that has historically been priced out of the kind of performance marketing operations enterprise brands take for granted.
Smart Bricks (US & UAE). Founded by Mohamed Mohamed. An intelligence layer for global real estate investing, building the data infrastructure needed to scale and manage international property portfolios. Cross-border real estate has long been an information-asymmetry problem; Smart Bricks is betting it can be solved with data.
nybl (UAE). Founded by Noor Alnahhas, Mohammed Shono, and four co-founders. Physics-informed AI for the critical industries civilization runs on, think energy, manufacturing, and heavy industry, where standard ML models often fail because they don’t respect the physical laws governing the systems they’re trying to predict.
Acceler8 (United States). Founded by Chinmay Chauhan and Trisha Pathak. AI for workforce intelligence and planning, claiming 5x faster workforce decisions at 5-10x lower cost than the spreadsheets, consultants, and legacy HR systems most companies still rely on. Notably, this is a category Deel itself plays in, making the pick a strong signal of where Deel sees the workforce stack evolving.
Alpic (France). Founded by Pierre-Louis Theron, Frédéric Barthelet, Nikolay Rodionov, Charles Sonigo, and Erica Beavers. A cloud platform built specifically for the Model Context Protocol, the emerging standard for connecting AI apps to data and tools. Alpic lets businesses build and deploy AI apps directly inside Claude or ChatGPT, an infrastructure bet on MCP becoming the way enterprise AI gets distributed.
The Bigger Reveal: Deel Ventures
The Grand Finale also served as the public launch of Deel Ventures, Deel’s dedicated investment arm. The mandate, in Deel’s framing, is straightforward: be an active, strategic partner to emerging startups by unlocking resources that help them grow, and find founders regardless of where they’re based.
Deel Ventures has already made 15+ investments outside of The Pitch competition, signaling that this isn’t a one-off marketing program but a sustained capital deployment effort. The vehicle will continue sourcing and backing seed-stage founders, with The Pitch acting as one, but not the only, funnel.
For Deel, the strategic logic compounds. The company has built one of the world’s largest distributed customer bases (40,000+ businesses across 150+ countries) and runs the local entity infrastructure that early-stage founders typically struggle to set up themselves. That gives Deel Ventures something most operator funds can’t offer: not just capital and distribution, but the actual scaffolding a portfolio company needs to hire and operate globally from day one, the same scaffolding Deel had to build for itself.
Co-founder & CEO Alex Bouaziz framed it this way:
“As a founder, giving back to the next generation of builders is something I care deeply about. The Pitch is how we do that at Deel, by identifying the strongest seed-stage founders in the world, regardless of where they’re from, and connecting them with the people and capital they need to succeed.”
What It Says About Seed-Stage Funding in 2026
A few takeaways worth holding onto.
Geographic diversity is becoming a deliberate sourcing strategy, not an accident. The Grand Finale’s five winners come from Ukraine, the US, the UAE, and France. Compare that to the concentration of AI investment in 2025, when North American AI startups attracted more than $69 billion in venture funding while European and Asian ventures captured roughly $6.4 billion and $3 billion respectively. Tournaments like The Pitch don’t erase that gap, but they create structured access points for founders outside the Bay Area, NYC, and London corridor.
Operator-led capital is filling a gap traditional VC won’t. Deel Ventures joins a growing list of late-stage operator funds that use their distribution, customer base, and brand recognition to source seed deals that institutional VCs miss. The pitch to founders is implicit but clear: you don’t just get capital, you get a partner whose own platform can accelerate your distribution.
AI infrastructure is still the dominant seed thesis. All five of the Grand Finale winners are explicitly building AI, for marketing, workforce planning, industrial systems, or as infrastructure for the MCP ecosystem. One interesting call out is Smart Bricks, which applies AI data intelligence to real estate. The signal: even at the seed stage, the strongest-graded companies in a global field are building the picks-and-shovels of the AI era.
For the five founders walking off the Pavillon Vendôme stage with active investor conversations ahead of them, the prize isn’t the SAFE. It’s the proof point. Out of 50,000, they were the five. That’s the kind of social proof that compounds.
The Pitch by Deel ran from February to May 2026 across seven regional events. Deel Ventures plans to continue investing in seed-stage founders globally.
Want more from Deel? Watch our interview w/ CEO Alex Bouaziz:
→ Listen on X, Spotify, YouTube, Apple
Turing—Turing partners with frontier AI labs to improve model capabilities in coding, reasoning, tool use, & multimodality, as well as with Fortune 500 enterprises to build & deploy end-to-end agentic AI systems in mission-critical workflows Visit: turing.com/sourcery
VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at GetVCX.com
Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: deel.com/sourcery
Public-–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. Try it today: public.com/sourcery
Merge—The leading provider of customer-facing integrations and agentic tools for frontier LLMs, Fortune 500 organizations, and B2B SaaS companies. Visit: https://merge.dev
The material presented on Molly O’Shea’s website are my opinions only and are provided for informational purposes and should not be construed as investment advice. It is not a recommendation of, or an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy, any particular security, strategy, or investment product. Any analysis or discussion of investments, sectors or the market generally are based on current information, including from public sources, that I consider reliable, but I do not represent that any research or the information provided is accurate or complete, and it should not be relied on as such. My views and opinions expressed in any website content are current at the time of publication and are subject to change. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.