Introducing Akai: Deel added $140M ARR in 90 days without hiring any new people,
By Alexbouaziz · September 22, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Introducing Akai: Deel added $140M ARR in 90 days without hiring any new people, automating ~600 employees' work using akai.run
Revenue per employee has 2x'd AND growth is accelerating.
We've been automating all our backend tasks.
Built >8k agents that do the work of ~600 employees.
We built Akai as an internal tool to automate our painfully repetitive operations in Finance, HR, Accounts Payable, and Compliance, etc. We never intended to make this a product. But it had such a dramatic impact on our business that today we are launching it for everyone.
How it works: Say you're automating payment reconciliation:
1. Record your screen while manually matching a messy transaction and Akai will capture your screen, voice, server requests
2. Akai will see that you pulled unformatted wire transfer info from an archaic bank portal, put it in some excel sheet, checked NetSuite invoices, payment history, and put a ticket on Zendesk
3. Akai reads between the lines and build a workflow + steps + conditional guardrails. It learns tacit edge cases, like resolving malformed invoice references without you writing a single regex
4. Simply connect NetSuite, your ledger, Zendesk, PSPs, and even legacy bank portals with zero API access
5. Run the workflow and tell it what to adjust in plain English: "strip slashes on wire memos and auto-apply partial payments." It adapts instantly
6. Once it works for you, add 100s of colleagues. Your entire payment ops team forks and extends the workflow for new PSPs, secondary ledgers, or regional settlement rules
7. We automated 85% of our payment reconciliation end to end, eliminating 500+ hours of soul-crushing manual grunt work every single week.
Claude Code/Codex can't do this in multiplayer mode. Every person rebuilds the same skill from scratch in their own way.
Deel built Akai to:
1. understand backend operations (it had to work for our 7000 person team first)
2. Collaborative across 1000s of employees
3. Self-Learning from millions of runs
4. Optimises cost and gets cheaper every run
We're so confident that we're announcing an Automation Guarantee:
If our engineers can't automate a thousand of hours of work in your first 30 days, you get a full refund.
Book a demo: https://www.akai.run if you're an exec at a company with hundreds of employees
Comment ’Akai’ below and you'll get $5000 in free credits + a repo of 100 Akai automations you can start using in your business today.