Startup of the Week: TFY

• Founded in London in 2015, TFY (Transformify Ltd.) enables companies to hire, onboard, manage and pay employees, contractors and freelancers across 184+ countries through one integrated platform.
• TFY was built without venture-capital funding, became profitable within three years and has continued scaling internationally while remaining independently financed. Its 2025 valuation has been reported at approximately $502 million, and the recently filed financial statements prove that TFYs valuation surpassed GBP 1bn valuation in 2026, benchmarking TFY to Deel, papayaGlobal, Workable, Recruitee, Lever, Ashby, Bamboo HR, Workday, etc. The benchmarked metrics include revenue and profit growth along with a churn rate of less than 1%.
• Alongside its commercial products, TFY provides its core AI-powered Applicant Tracking System to charities and NGOs at no cost and supports initiatives designed to expand access to employment and technology.

Website: https://www.transformify.org/

Tell Us About TFY

TFY (Transformify Ltd.) is a global workforce technology company founded in London in 2015 by Lilia Stoyanov.

We started with a simple observation: the way companies engage independent professionals globally was unnecessarily complicated. Contractors were expected to manage invoices, payments, documentation and compliance almost like businesses themselves, while companies had to piece together multiple systems to recruit, onboard, manage and pay them.

TFY was created to simplify that entire journey.

Today, our platform brings together an AI-powered Applicant Tracking System (ATS), Contractor of Record/Agent of Record services, Employer of Record, contractor and vendor management, compliance workflows, billing automation and global payments. Companies can manage their global workforce across 184+ countries without relying on a fragmented collection of providers and systems.

What makes our journey particularly unusual is how we have grown. TFY has remained bootstrapped, without relying on venture-capital funding, and became profitable only three years after launch.

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What Makes TFY Unique?

TFY is unusual both in what we have built and how we have built it.

From a product perspective, many workforce technology companies solve one part of the problem — recruitment, payroll, contractor management or compliance. TFY connects those stages. A company can use AI to identify talent, onboard contractors, manage documentation and compliance, automate invoicing and make cross-border payments through the same ecosystem.

Our AI philosophy is equally important. We have invested in technology that looks beyond job titles and traditional keyword matching to understand skills and transferable capabilities. The objective is not simply to automate recruitment, but to help employers discover talent they might otherwise overlook.

And then there is our business model. TFY has scaled internationally while remaining independently financed. We deliberately chose to let customers, profitability and long-term value creation shape the company rather than successive fundraising cycles.

For us, profitability also creates responsibility. Through our Give Back to Society approach, charities and NGOs can access the core functionality of our AI-powered ATS at no cost.

Is There A Market For TFY?

The way companies build teams has fundamentally changed.

Talent is global, but employment laws, tax requirements, contractor classifications, currencies and payment infrastructure remain local.

A company in London may find its best developer in Nigeria, designer in Brazil, consultant in Poland and data specialist in India. Finding those people is increasingly easy. Hiring, onboarding, classifying, managing and paying them compliantly is the difficult part.

That creates a significant need for platforms such as TFY.

Businesses increasingly manage international contractors, freelancers, remote teams and distributed workforces while simultaneously dealing with worker-classification requirements, cross-border payments, invoicing, onboarding and compliance.

TFY effectively provides the infrastructure connecting these pieces. Instead of HR, finance, procurement and legal teams managing separate workflows and providers, they can operate through one global workforce platform.

The market opportunity grows as work becomes increasingly skills-based, flexible and borderless, while regulatory requirements become more complex rather than less.

What Excites You Most About The Future Of TFY?

We are particularly excited about the intersection of AI, global talent and the connected workforce.

AI has the potential to fundamentally change how people are matched with opportunities. Instead of reducing an individual to their previous job title, technology can increasingly understand transferable skills, experience and potential.

At the same time, geography is becoming less relevant to where companies find expertise. Someone’s postcode should not determine whether they can contribute to a world-class company.

TFY sits at the intersection of these two transformations: helping companies discover talent intelligently and then providing the infrastructure to engage and pay that talent globally.

We are also particularly excited about markets such as Africa, where a young, increasingly educated population, growing technology ecosystem and expanding global workforce create enormous potential. TFY already operates across the continent, including markets such as Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Ghana.

Longer term, we want TFY’s journey to demonstrate something beyond technology: that a globally significant company can be female-founded, independently financed, profitable and purpose-driven at the same time.

Why Should People Be Paying Attention To TFY?

Because TFY challenges several assumptions about what a successful technology company is supposed to look like.

We were founded and backed by a female angel investor, and female founders and angel investors are just a tiny percentagentage. We did not raise venture capital. We became profitable within three years. We built globally. We now serve organisations across more than 180 countries, and TFY was included in the FT1000: Europe’s Fastest-Growing Companies 2026.

Our company milestones also point to a valuation exceeding $500 million in 2025, and north of GBP 1bn in 2026.

But the story is bigger than a valuation.

TFY demonstrates that founders do not necessarily have to choose between growth and profitability, technology and social impact, or commercial success and independence.

We believe there is more than one way to build an extraordinary global technology company – and TFY is evidence of what an alternative path can look like.

Where Can We Find TFY?