Deel has acquired Sastrify, a leading AI-powered SaaS procurement & management platform. Pumped to welcome Sven Lackinger, Max Messing, and the whole Sastrify team! This is the 14th acquisition we've done at Deel. Maybe good opp to speak about how we think about M&A: - Don't make a deal unless it's a "hell yes" Deals that didn't go very well were those that we were 70-85% certain. Aim for 85-99% certainty. There's enough information out there. Everything must make sense: product, roadmap, financials, and people. You can't hope to convert hundreds of people into your culture. We go for those who already operate like we do. Sven, Max, and their team are outstanding. We're lucky to now have them as colleagues. - Acquire for expertise & accelerate time to market. In 2019, we started going down the legal rabbit hole of hiring abroad. How to set up entities in other countries, different regulatory environments concerning payroll, gross-to-net salary calculations, tax compliance. It took us 5 years of building to have an operationally great product. We can't pretend to do the same in 6 months for other products. People like Sven and Max -who have obsessed over theirs for 5-15- years are invaluable. - We want to own 100% of the customer experience. We started Deel IT with devices. Now we're expanding into the full software lifecycle - licenses, renewals, spend optimization. Customers want to use less vendors; it's simpler. And the more things we own at Deel, the more details we can be in. - Integration time can get halved by doing the right things. At Deel, we follow a simple process that cut integration time by 50%+ without adding extra risk. Step 1: Rebuild frontend inside Deel while keeping the backend running underneath. v1 live within a month. Step 2: Put that v1 in the hands of sales org so the 9–12 month ramp to selling comfort starts on day one. Step 3: In parallel, engineering rebuilds the full backend natively and migrates all customers over 3–12 months. Step 4: By month 12, the product is fully native and the sales team is already trained. - AI is compressing the timeline even more. The hardest part of M&A has always been rewriting backends, migrating data, and stitching systems together. But engineers are shipping code at 4x the pace of two years ago. What used to be the bottleneck in every acquisition isn't one anymore. And the faster you integrate, the faster you realize the synergies and compound your advantage. - The only good deal is one where both sides look back five years later and say they're happy it happened.