Company Bio
Papaya Global is an international payroll and payments platform that achieved unicorn status in 2021 with a $3.7 billion valuation. Recognized by Time, Forbes, and NelsonHall as one of the world’s most innovative companies, the startup is pioneering a new era of seamless, universally compliant global workforce management.
Industry: Financial services
Company Size: Enterprise (200+ employees)
As the world’s largest enterprises embrace the benefits of a remote, international workforce, the demand for cloud-based solutions to support employees is on a meteoric rise. Enter Papaya Global, an Israeli startup that offers cloud-based payroll, hiring and onboarding, and compliance services for more than 2,000 companies, including household names like Toyota, Sodastream, Bumble, and Dr. Martens.
Papaya Global is determined to stay ahead of its competition. In 2023, it became the first payroll platform to offer international payment capabilities. The company has also taken bold steps in its brand-building and customer experience strategy, investing in a memorable Super Bowl ad (see above) and launching its Payroll and Payments Academy in 2024.
Behind the scenes, Marketing Operations & Growth Team Leader Yonatan Bar Or and DevOps Team Lead Rotem Birman are responsible for the operations that keep the revenue engine rolling as the company expands the volume of high-value customers entering the brand’s orbit. Their lean teams use a bevy of tools for targeted account-based marketing (ABM) and white-glove customer relationship management. Detailed customer data and automation also play key roles in Papaya Global’s ability to deliver excellent experiences.
The marketing team is relatively small, and relies on support from HubSpot and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to get the job done.
“We want to take over the world,” Bar Or laughs. “Our goal is to grow in the payment sector, reach new markets, and improve our product. I think HubSpot will help us reach our goals because it can support basically every business request that will get us there.”
Automating orchestration to drive incredible efficiency
Bar Or’s team uses HubSpot as a core component of their marketing and customer management tech ecosystem alongside Gong, which delivers customer insights. The team incorporates data from several locations, including enrichment data sources, lead-capture forms on their website, their CRM, and Papaya Global software.
Bar Or relies on the marketing automation capabilities within Hubspot Marketing Hub to drive campaigns using the incoming information.
“For example, we use Workato to feed data from Papaya Global into HubSpot, where it triggers processes for inbound leads, such as email marketing,” Bar Or explains. “With the HubSpot platform as a cog in the machine, we are able to support a very large ABM and ABX system, integrated through several platforms. We can do it all without using any code.”
The HubSpot platform enables Bar Or and his team to weave data into an experience for Papaya Global’s customers. Automation reduces and even eliminates time-to-action on everyday marking tasks while the reporting capabilities help the team understand what’s working and what isn’t, speeding up their ability to iterate and improve their targeting. “We have full control of how the data comes in, how it's manipulated, and where and when it’s being pushed or synced across all the platforms,” Bar Or says. “HubSpot software also provides very robust reporting, which has greatly increased our efficiency over the past year.”
Enabling a small team to deliver outsized impact to achieve growth goals
Automation also empowers Bar Or’s team to keep up with Papaya Global’s rapid growth. “HubSpot software allows me to achieve things that we shouldn’t be achieving with a team this size,” he says. “We’ve been able to scale up our operations very efficiently with a very small team of marketing operations managers. It enabled us to work on a lot of accounts and contracts on a large scale, with many sales representatives, without needing to have a big team.”
HubSpot’s ease of use also makes the solution scalable across Papaya Global’s growing marketing team. “HubSpot has been my platform of choice in all my roles prior to Papaya Global because it’s so easy to onboard new users and train them on the platform,” Bar Or says. “The system is clear and user-friendly. It’s very easy to collaborate and connect your whole team so you’re all on the same page.” Having a single source of truth that all team members feel comfortable using is essential because Papaya Global has a remote workforce, with employees clocking in from more than 21 countries. The HubSpot platform makes it easy for Bar Or’s team to collaborate so that they can set the pace for the brand’s growth trajectory.
Unmatched flexibility facilitates creative solutions for tomorrow’s challenges
In a business that’s moving as fast as Papaya Global in such a competitive market, rapid adaptability allows the brand to connect with new customers and exceed their expectations — before the competition can catch up. “If you’re flexible as an operations manager, then whatever your business director asks for, you can do it,” Bar Or says. “One of the most important things about the HubSpot platform is its flexibility. The automations and integrations give the marketing team so many options for what they can do. It allows us to achieve even the most complex business goals.”
AWS also plays a significant role in Papaya Global’s tech stack. The cloud offers superior flexibility across regions, which allows the company to be compliant with strict regulations, such as GDPR, in all countries where customers use Papaya Global.
The AWS infrastructure increases our resilience and ability to survive failures," Birman explains. "We utilize three availability zones. So, if one zone becomes unavailable, we can continue providing uninterrupted service to our customers using the other two zones.
The team uses AI to track changes in regulations and ensure compliance and validate user information, particularly for payroll. AWS helps them scale services up and down, and they rely on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) for the easy “lift and shift” capabilities and automatic scaling.
But the list of services doesn't end there. Papaya Global uses a full stack of Amazon services, including:
- Amazon RDS, including MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Amazon Auroras of all kinds and sizes
- Amazon Key Management Service (KMS) to encrypt their databases and Amazon S3 Cloud Object Storage to store client payslip data according to compliance
- Amazon GuardDuty for threat detection
- Amazon CloudFront for content delivery
- AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for obtaining, managing, and deploying public and private SSL/TLS certificates,
"What service are we not using? That's an easier question," Birman laughs. "I cannot think of an AWS service that we’re not using right now."
Papaya Global is an AWS-recognized partner, which allows them to offer additional developer training from AWS. Upskilling developers helps their customers, who get better products faster because the developers know how to better utilize the tools they have from Amazon. And in turn, that benefits the business, which can scale faster and easier when using all Amazon services to their full extent.
Pairing HubSpot with the rich services of AWS enables Papaya Global to remain agile and adaptable.
Creative solutions for tomorrow’s challenges
HubSpot’s user-friendly platform and robust integrations put Bar Or in the driver’s seat of performance optimization on a granular level. “As a marketing operations manager, HubSpot software allows a lot of creativity,” he says. “When I come across an issue — which is something that happens daily in operations — I can find creative solutions that enable me to overcome some really tough challenges.”
Bar Or sees flexibility as a key factor in Papaya Global’s ability to achieve its ambitious vision. As HubSpot improves its platform and increases its integrations, Bar Or is confident that it will continue to meet his team’s needs. “When you’re growing, you need to expand to different platforms and HubSpot software can support that in a very reliable way,” he says. “It can go with a company into massive growth.”
Papaya Global continues to deliver transformative innovation to customers, reshaping the way international workforce management and global payments happen. With the ability to iterate based on nuanced customer data and address obstacles the moment they surface, Bar Or and his team are well-equipped to take Papaya Global to yet another level of success. “Thanks to our network of tools, including HubSpot and AWS, our operational system is at a point where we can respond immediately to anything the business demands and, to me as an operations leader, that’s a very strong position to be in.”