Factorial, a European enterprise technology scale-up with a growing presence in African markets, has closed a $150 million Series D funding round led by General Catalyst, valuing the company at $2.5 billion.
The round also included participation from existing investors Atomico and Four Rivers. Alongside the equity investment, General Catalyst will provide an additional $540 million in non-dilutive capital through its Customer Value Fund, bringing Factorial’s total non-dilutive funding to more than $700 million.
The investment comes as HR technology adoption accelerates across East African markets. According to Deloitte’s “2025 Africa Human Capital Trends” report, more than 60% of medium-sized enterprises in Africa’s major cities have adopted at least one digital HR tool. The continent’s payroll software market, valued at $487.3 million in 2026, is projected to reach $1.66 billion by 2035, growing at a compound annual rate of 14.60%. The report attributes the growth to increased cloud adoption, rising compliance burdens and the expansion of mobile-first enterprise infrastructure. As governments tighten tax regulations, businesses are increasingly turning to cloud-based HR platforms capable of handling complex regulatory frameworks — in one example, an HR system helped a Kenyan logistics firm cut payroll processing time from five days to under six hours while significantly reducing errors.
The funding round underpins a broader shift in Factorial’s product strategy. Over the past decade, the company built one of Europe’s largest record-keeping ecosystems spanning HR, finance and IT for more than 16,000 businesses across over 90 countries. It is now repositioning itself from a conventional Software-as-a-Service provider to an AI workforce operations platform, centred on Factorial One — a unified workspace built around a two-agent system. One agent is trained to learn an organization’s HR, finance and IT policies, while the second represents individual employees, drafting work, offering suggestions and performing tasks on their behalf.
“Ten years ago, we started Factorial as a SaaS company,” said Jordi Romero, CEO and co-founder of Factorial. “Today, Factorial is an AI-first company, working towards creating agents for our clients. We have completed our transformation journey by resetting the product, the architecture, and running our client’s operations around AI agents. This partnership will give us the required confidence and capital to build an industry-defining product.”
Factorial said the shift addresses a pressing challenge for East African enterprises, which face growing demands around payroll management, HR compliance, talent engagement and performance tracking as they scale. Cloud-based HR systems, automated recruitment and onboarding tools, data analytics and employee engagement platforms are among the technologies gaining traction across Kenya in 2025 and 2026, helping organizations cut costs, improve employee experience and comply with local labour laws.
“East Africa represents one of the most exciting growth frontiers for enterprise technology. The ambition, the pace of business growth, and the appetite for intelligent solutions across Kenya and the wider region are unlike anywhere else we operate,” said Francesc Rul·lan, VP of strategy and partnerships at Factorial. “We are committed to being a long-term partner to East African organisations as they build the people management infrastructure needed to compete and scale.”
More information is available at https://factorial.ke/
