TFY has crossed the billion-dollar threshold without traditional venture capital. In an industry where rivals have raised hundreds of millions, its unusual route raises a more interesting question about what a private technology company is really worth.
The technology industry has become remarkably good at manufacturing unicorns.
For much of the past decade, the formula was familiar: raise progressively larger rounds, demonstrate sufficiently rapid growth, and allow the latest financing to establish a new headline valuation. A $1bn price tag became shorthand for success, even when profitability remained somewhere over the horizon.
Transformify Ltd, better known as TFY, has arrived at the same threshold from almost the opposite direction.
The London-based workforce technology company has recently been valued at just over $1bn following independent assessments referenced by its founder and reported by TechRound. Yet TFY has never raised a conventional venture-capital round. Its external financing, according to the company, was limited to a Virgin Startup loan in 2016 and an Innovate UK grant in 2020. The rest of its expansion has been financed principally by customers and profits.
That makes TFY an anomaly in the global workforce technology market and potentially an important one.
Founded in 2015 by Lilia Stoyanov, TFY is a global workforce technology platform combining contractor payroll with ethical AI in hiring, helping businesses hire, manage, and pay global talent. It now operates across more than 184 countries.
But its most interesting numbers may be financial rather than geographical.
Revenue increased from €5.9mn in 2021 to €25.9mn in 2024, more than quadrupling in three years. The company became profitable within three years of launching and has remained profitable since. In 2024 alone, profit increased by 90 per cent.
Those figures helped TFY rank 284th in the FT1000 list of Europe’s fastest-growing companies in 2026.
The latest milestone now places the company in a category that was once largely reserved for heavily financed technology businesses.
And that makes comparison with its peers instructive.
The expensive route to building global payroll
Global workforce technology has attracted extraordinary amounts of private capital.
Deel, perhaps the sector’s most prominent company, announced a $300mn Series E in October 2025 that valued the business at $17.3bn. By then, the company said it had exceeded $1bn in annual recurring revenue and recorded three consecutive years of profitability.
That is an impressive business by almost any measure. But it is also a business built with substantial institutional capital behind it.
Papaya Global followed another venture-backed trajectory. Its $250mn Series D in 2021 valued the payroll company at $3.7bn, following a $100mn Series C earlier that year. Public funding data indicates the business has raised more than $440mn.
Remote.com provides another useful comparison. In April 2022, the company raised $300mn in a Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, taking its valuation to roughly $3bn and its total funding at the time to $495mn.
TFY’s valuation is smaller than each of those headline figures.
But that is precisely what makes the comparison interesting.
| Company | Reported private valuation | Selected funding context |
| Deel | $17.3bn | $300mn Series E in 2025 |
| Papaya Global | $3.7bn | $250mn Series D; more than $440mn raised |
| Remote | ~$3bn | $300mn Series C; $495mn raised by that round |
| TFY | Just over $1bn | No traditional VC rounds |
These numbers should not be treated as a conventional league table. They come from different years, financing environments and valuation methodologies. Deel’s $17.3bn valuation, for example, accompanied a fresh institutional financing round. Papaya Global’s widely reported $3.7bn figure dates to the exuberant technology market of 2021. Remote’s roughly $3bn benchmark dates to 2022.
TFY’s valuation is different again: it is not the clearing price of a recent equity financing.
That distinction matters.
What exactly does $1bn mean?
Private-company valuations are often discussed with a precision they do not deserve.
A financing-round valuation tells investors what a particular group of buyers was willing to pay for a particular class of shares at a particular moment. It does not necessarily mean the entire company could be sold for the same amount tomorrow.
Nor does a valuation derived from comparable-company analysis carry the same evidentiary weight as an arm’s-length financing or acquisition.
TFY’s $1bn assessment should therefore be understood for what it is: a private-company valuation benchmark, not a public-market capitalisation and not a billion-dollar cash offer for the business.
But the same discipline should be applied to venture-backed unicorns. And recent history provides a particularly useful warning.
The Sorare problem
Sorare offers an extreme illustration of how dramatically the meaning of a unicorn valuation can change.
The French fantasy sports company became one of Europe’s most celebrated technology businesses during the NFT boom. Its $680mn Series B in September 2021 valued the company at $4.3bn.
It was a spectacular number, achieved at a spectacular moment for crypto assets.
What followed was considerably less spectacular.
Sorare subsequently endured the collapse of the NFT boom and a much more difficult operating environment. By 2026, estimates of its value outside the company’s official financing history had fallen dramatically below that $4.3bn peak.
Yet Sorare has not disappeared.
In September 2026, existing investors including Accel, Benchmark and Partech returned for a new late-stage financing. The amount was not officially disclosed, although reporting described an eight-figure investment structured in multiple tranches. Sorare has also reported an 85 per cent year-on-year increase in net revenue during the first half of 2026 and is targeting a return to profitability by the end of 2027.
The lesson is not that Sorare was never a $4.3bn company.
It is subtler than that.
A private valuation is a snapshot of expectations, capital availability, growth assumptions and investor appetite at a particular point in time. When those assumptions change, the number can change with them.
Sorare’s journey from a $4.3bn financing-round valuation to retrenchment and now a quieter recovery demonstrates why the quality of the business beneath a valuation ultimately matters more than the headline itself.
That is where TFY presents an interesting contrast.
A unicorn without the fundraising machinery
There was no $250mn or $300mn financing announcement accompanying TFY’s arrival at $1bn.
There was no lead investor setting a price for a new round.
There was no sudden injection of capital to fund another period of expansion.
Instead, the case for TFY’s valuation rests heavily on the underlying economics of a company that has already demonstrated revenue growth and profitability.
Its revenue increased from €5.9mn to €25.9mn between 2021 and 2024. It became profitable relatively early in its existence. Its financial statements are filed publicly at Companies House, including accounts for the year ended December 2025 filed in July 2026.
This does not automatically make a $1bn valuation correct. Investors could reasonably disagree about the appropriate revenue or earnings multiple, the durability of growth, customer concentration, competitive risk and the discount that should apply to an illiquid private company.
But it changes the nature of the argument.
The question is less about whether investors can be persuaded to finance another round and more about what multiple should be placed on an established, profitable technology business growing in an attractive global market.
That may sound like a subtle distinction. In private technology markets, it is a significant one.
The female-founder question
There is another reason TFY’s milestone has attracted attention.
Stoyanov is a female technology founder in an ecosystem where women remain severely underrepresented among founders receiving institutional capital.
TechRound recently examined whether TFY could be the UK’s first female-founded, bootstrapped unicorn.
There is good reason for caution around the superlative.
Proving that a company is definitively the “first” requires establishing not merely its valuation but also the ownership, funding history, founder status and valuation of every plausible predecessor. TechRound itself acknowledged that difficulty, saying its research had not identified another UK-based, female-owned bootstrapped unicorn while stopping short of claiming the distinction had been conclusively verified.
The caveat does not make the underlying achievement less unusual.
There are relatively few British technology businesses that can simultaneously claim to be female-founded, privately held, profitable, internationally scaled, largely bootstrapped and valued above $1bn.
Whether TFY is literally number one may ultimately matter less than why the list of comparable companies is so short.
Capital efficiency is becoming interesting again
TFY’s emergence also arrives at an opportune moment in the technology cycle.
The zero-interest-rate era rewarded a particular type of startup behaviour. Capital was inexpensive, private valuations expanded rapidly and market share frequently took precedence over near-term profitability.
That environment produced extraordinary companies. It also produced valuations that proved difficult to sustain once the cost of capital increased and investors began asking harder questions about margins and cash generation.
Sorare’s story sits at one end of that cycle.
Deel illustrates another outcome: enormous external investment combined with extraordinary revenue growth and, more recently, sustained profitability.
TFY represents a third model.
Its story is not evidence that venture capital is unnecessary. Some markets require enormous upfront investment, and external capital can allow companies to compress years of expansion into months.
Nor does bootstrapping automatically create a better company. Underinvestment can be just as dangerous as excessive spending.
What TFY demonstrates is simply that venture financing and company building are not synonymous.
For a decade, Stoyanov chose to finance expansion primarily through the economics of the business itself. The consequence was almost certainly slower access to capital than a heavily funded rival enjoyed. The benefit was ownership, independence and the discipline imposed by having customers rather than investors finance growth.
There is an important difference between a company that needs its next funding round to continue growing and one for which fundraising is optional.
Markets may be rediscovering the value of that distinction.
Beyond the unicorn label
TFY’s next challenge may be harder than reaching the milestone itself.
At $1bn, it is entering a competitive class populated by companies with substantially larger war chests, greater brand recognition and, in Deel’s case, a valuation more than 17 times TFY’s current benchmark.
Maintaining rapid growth while preserving profitability will test the advantages of the bootstrapped model.
There is also the question of valuation verification. Without a priced external equity round, acquisition or public listing, TFY’s billion-dollar status will inevitably be more open to debate than a valuation established through a large institutional transaction.
That scepticism is healthy.
But it should be applied equally across the private technology market.
The past five years have provided ample evidence that raising money at a $1bn, $3bn or even $4bn valuation does not make that number permanent. A valuation is an opinion about the future expressed in today’s money.
Businesses eventually have to grow into it.
TFY’s unusual proposition is that much of the business came first.
The billion-dollar number arrived later.
And in an industry that spent years celebrating how much capital companies could raise, a profitable technology business reaching unicorn territory without a traditional VC round may be a more revealing milestone than another record-breaking fundraise.
Published in Partnership with Transformify Ltd
