The Dayforce Deal: AI, Scale and the Future of Workforce Software

It's amazing how quickly you and your company have moved. You know, we study, we're in the business of studying these fields and you're so way ahead of the competition. It again, it comes down to simplicity, clarity of purpose. And if you have the right data model, you can actually move very, very quickly. Welcome to Tomo Bravo's Behind the Deal. I'm Orlando Bravo, founder and managing partner at Tomo Bravo. Today, we're telling the story of one of the most significant acquisitions in the firm's history. In 2025, Tomo Bravo entered into an agreement to acquire day force. The deal was an all cash transaction valued at 12.3 billion. Day force has spent years building what many consider to be the gold standard for managing the complexities of the modern workforce. It's a human capital management platform or HCM powered by AI and offering solutions like no other. I'm sitting down with Tara Gadgill, a partner here at Tomo Bravo. We go through the deal and discuss why day force stood out to us and why we were so excited to help the company accelerate its global expansion, deepen its AI capabilities and grow into its full potential as a true great enterprise platform. David Ossip, founder and CEO of day force, will join us to share his perspective on what this partnership means for the business, its customers, and its mission to make work life better, a greater scale and size than ever before. This is a special one. Let's dive in. Hi, Tara. How are you? Great. How are you doing, Orlando? Good. I just I feel like we were talking about another deal five minutes ago. And now we get to talk about day force. That's exactly right. That's awesome. One of the things for the listeners that I want them to understand is kind of also how a deal comes about that it takes many years. Tell us how long you've been looking at human capital management and how many companies you've looked at over the years. Sure. So I have been studying the human capital management space for over a decade. I think my partner Holden Spade has been studying it for two decades. And there have been thousands of companies, frankly, that we've looked at. These are big companies that offer sweet solutions. These are companies that offer point solutions. We look at companies of scale, but we also look at very early companies to see what technologies are in the horizon. What could actually disrupt a space? And frankly, that's how we came across day force. The CEO David Asset was developing a company that was poised to really disrupt legacy human capital management. It's amazing that domain knowledge that you and the rest of the team has over many years of revisiting these companies. What is the you remember the first time that you came across day force or that you met with David? Yes, my first conversation with David, I think was in 2017 where he had just combined with Seridian, which was kind of a legacy human capital management bureau provider. And it was essentially one of the biggest sort of David and Goliath moments, sort of the the minnow swallowing the whale David had created this incredible company day force that didn't have a lot of revenue, but had the best technology and had combined it with Seridian. And I really wanted to see what he was thinking about that transformation because it was just such a Herculean transformation and just the way that he discussed taking step by step a great product and offering it to a really wide customer base and transforming a company from one that is legacy to truly next generation, cloud, software that did all of the very best things that every customer actually needed. That was incredible. And I remember noting that and saying, I got to learn more. That's amazing. I remember that meeting. I think it was you and Holden with David listening to a founder entrepreneur, a disruptor with a very small company, but very interesting company. And I guess it turned out pretty well. Well, I would say so given that you know, we ended up buying the company several years later for many multiples of what David had in terms of revenue at the time that he can buy in but Seridian. And I think that it really speaks to backing just a great founder product focus, but also very commercial thinking about, okay, what is the customer need? What am I trying to service? And how can I do that in the very best way possible? That's what we look for across every single category of software. I think it's particularly needed in human capital management, which is relevant to every company in the planet. You always have to pay your people. And all the listeners, what does the company really do? Human capital management is a broad field. You mentioned it's full of point solutions and some platforms. What is Dave horse about and what do they do? So very simply Dave horse is software that helps a company, manages people operations. So if you break that down, there's payroll, there's time and attendance, there's talent management, there's benefits and their people analytics. And Dave horse does all of that within one single platform with one single code base and one single data layer, which is truly unique in the market and frankly enables them to now at scale deliver the agentic HCM. Because they have the data layer to be able to inform really the next generation of products that David is really excited to share with you. Tell us more about why that's so important. You mentioned AI. You mentioned that single data. Tell us about ROI. Why is that so unique? Well, when David first came in to talk with us in earnest in the summer of 24, I remember really well. He came in and he said, look, what we do is very, very simple. We help a customer take 12 disparate systems and we offer one system. And we offer that at a lower price with better service. That's the ROI. That really was the aha moment where we said, look, we got to figure out how to back this guy and we got to figure out how to buy this company because with that kind of ROI with the architecture that he has built across all a platform. Really maniacally almost as a first purpose. I want to build modern single platform single data. I'm not going to get distracted by name your favorite consolidation play or other bolt on that frankly a lot of the legacy. I'm competitors have have really fallen prey to. I want to create the best series of products, but in the single pane of glass. And I think that David is very good at seeing where the puck is going. And he had been thinking about AI way before all of us have been talking about it at length. And he said, well, with that single data architecture, think about the orchestration that I can help customers manage. This is not just a system of record. His vision was a system of action and a system of orchestration and now with their agenda products you're really seeing the manifestation of that is just amazing. The simplicity of product. Simple to understand simple to use and make makes the customers a lot of money versus their alternatives. It's a beautiful thing. So you have the space that you've followed for a decade, a company that you've followed for many years that you've seen evolve and work two billion of revenue at the time. Great profitability. What and a single platform single data. How did you validate that what were some of your key areas of diligence to make sure this would be a good investment. So I think about three main things when I look at a company. First and foremost, I think about leadership is the leadership team, particularly led by the CEO, are they the domain experts in their space? Do they truly understand the need of the customers and can they foresee what the customers not only need tomorrow, but the next day, year and decade. It's all about leadership and frankly in this world of AI, what technology is shifting so quickly that's even more true. So number one, how is leadership? Number two, I go directly to customers. These can be either the customers of the company like they force as customers or frankly customers of other companies in the space and I say, what is your experience? What is your experience with your payroll company? What is your experience with your talent company? And I listen, I do a lot of listening and we'll talk to a hundred customers before we even start true diligence on the financials of a specific. Company because we want to hear what what are customers thinking about in the space and really what surface is. Day force had the best product and the best service. And that's really, really important for human capital functions within companies where they have a lot of different responsibilities and paying people on time in a compliant way. With a lot of rules and regulations. That's the single most stressful thing that our buyer is dealing with. As long as customers are happy, everything is good. Lastly, of course, we look very deeply at the point. financials. If it's a public company, there is data in the public domain. If we're doing work with a company and are able to get several layers underneath, we really study the data. I think what we saw with this company in particular is that they were really seeing new sales momentum. That new sales momentum had picked up over a number of quarters, but it wasn't necessarily super visible because there's a little bit of lag between when a new sale is made and when it realizes into revenue. We double-clicked a lot of ways. Where is this new momentum coming from? Is it one product or is it many products? Is it from new customer sales or are you selling more into existing customers? As we sort of peel back the onion, we just started seeing that day force was winning and winning in a really big way against legacy competitors, against point solutions. We knew that this was a company that we really need to learn more about in back. I remember for a month that would walk around the office going, "Do you guys know where Tara is?" No, she's with customers. She's at a user conference. Your team was as well and you would come back from that with real, tangible learning and understanding of the business actually worked. Where the customers were at in different journeys. So more AI forward. So I'm just needed to pay their hourly workers on time and understanding the true sense of business was key on this deal. I remember that really well. Indi-legends, so many moving parts. You remember a couple of surprises, either really positive, really negative, that cost you concern. Talk to us about that journey. Yeah, I would say that the surprises were really to the positive. We had been studying the company for a long time. We had talked to the company in the summer of 2024. We didn't consummate a deal then for a variety of different reasons. But again, week over week or month over month, we continued to maintain dialogue with the leadership team. We would go to user conferences. We would talk to customers. We started seeing this momentum building. When we started in earnest, again, discussing a potential deal with the company in the summer of 2025, we just were pretty odd at the pipeline of new sales that this team had built. We started looking at conversion rates. The conversion rates were amazing. Particularly, the conversion rates were incredible for existing customers because there was a meaningful uptick in the cross-cell of other products into an existing customer base. Lo and behold, this company went from 10% bookings growth in 2024 to 40% in 2025. We just really started seeing that momentum. That was a very pleasant surprise. I think the second thing that we really, really enjoyed is getting to the whole leadership team. This is a team that has worked together for a very long time. They are incredibly competitive. Actually, a couple members of my team played Padelle with a couple members of their team at 6am, I think, before an 8am, diligent session start. They came away saying, "These guys are messing around." That's actually the way that each of these leaders on the executive team think about both play and work. It's in a very collaborative way with one another, but they're always pushing each other. It was interesting seeing that during a diligent session where you would think that people might be a little bit feeling each other out and maybe best behavior. Not that it was bad behavior, but just robust conversation, always pushing on each other, always pressing each other. We love that because that's the way we operate, as you know. I really love that meeting that we had in Miami with the whole team. Wow, I stepped out with you and hold on and said, "What a team. That was one of the aha moments for me." Then remember in the summer when you're underwriting the bookings of the company, they keep going up and up and they still beat them. Exactly. How was it to buy such an important company that is doing so well, but at the same time in a market that seems to be collapsing and super volatile? How was that? How stressful was that? I was a very stressful. Thank you for saying that because I was really stressed out. I mean, you don't take these kinds of capital decisions. You don't take any capital decisions lightly, but certainly such an important company for its customers at the scale at which we were talking. I mean, we were incredibly stressed out because there's so much noise in the market around all kinds of things. This software going to be relevant is AI, a tailwind or a headwind. Is everything just going to be vibe coded? So we have this noise around us, but I think what really helped is, "Hey, what is the actual performance of this company and what is being delivered to the customer?" And I think we answered that question during diligence, yes. And now, since we signed the deal in August of 2025, it feels like we've been operating as one. And I will say that everything that we under wrote in terms of the team's ability to harness every opportunity available has come true. We just had an amazing board meeting week before last. And the head of product, Joe, was talking about a GenTik HCM and all of the very tangible products that are being released in real time. Frankly, faster than they've ever been able to release everything before because delivery is just so much faster with all the tools available. And the excitement that he was showing and the entire management was showing was just infectious. And you're seeing it in the results? Yeah, tell us that. Good decision or bad decision? Great decision. Absolutely. I agree. And tell us a little bit of how it's working out. Well, I would say it's working out very well. We signed the deal in August of 2025. The company crushed its new sales number or what we call bookings, 40% year-over-year growth last year. And frankly, it is on track to deliver an incredible year this year. Had a great first quarter. And what I would say is really, really exciting is the new products that are being released. Well, you certainly did incredible work on this deal. And something that I'm really proud of too is your extremely hands on. And that really showed holding that co-led deal with you is extremely hands on. And then there's me lurking around being hands on as well. So every time the way we work as a team when we have an idea, we call each other at 11 p.m. at midnight at six in the morning, not to intrude in everybody's life, but we do. And we just have real conversations and make many, many, many decisions. And I think the way this deal was done and the investment decision was just wonderful. And thank you for an incredible conversation. And thank you for an awesome deal. And now I will be joined by David Osip, the founder and CEO of DayForce. David, thank you so much for being here. I know how busy you are. And I call you on Saturday Sundays for all kinds of advice on the history of coding or what's going over the AI and your space. And now we get to do this, you know, for listeners. So thank you. Thank you so much. Orlando, happy to be here. Let's start from the beginning for those people that don't know you as well. How did you possibly get into human capital management? What did you do? DayForce is my third company in the space. My first company I sold was actually in financial services. How do banks manage risk, price risk? And I sold that to one of the Canadian banks C I B C and I went off to business school. And as I was coming out of business school, I came across this opportunity of time and attendance out of Africa. And there was a very small company there of about five people making five million dollars of cash property. And my initial hypothesis is, wow, great technology. Maybe there's an opportunity for it in North America. So in my final year of business school, I took the time in two courses and I called out to about 550 organizations in Massachusetts. And I surveyed them as to what they were looking for versus what this company had in South Africa. And I had found that the technology had leapfrogged North America. So upon graduation, I went off, sat there for about six months in South Africa, learned the hardware, rewrote the software, brought it to North American, started up a company late 92, 93. And that company grew very, very quickly. Great customers like Toyota and Michelin. That company was sold in about 97 to a Japanese organization. Eventually, I left and started up another company in workforce management. And I think you know, the story of that one also grew very, very quickly. Zero to about $120, $130 million in about four years, focusing really on how do you schedule people for retail? And we had about a 50% market show of retail at all the airlines, most of the big banks. And that company, as you know, was also sold in 2007. So the story of day falls begins in 2009. And in 2009, I'm looking at the HCM space. And I'm sensitive at this point around the concept of addressable market size. Because the prior company grew very quickly and I ran out of market of that very specialized solution. And at the Json C2 workforce management is co-hR and payroll and benefits and all the talent modules. And from a research perspective, I found a disconnect between the expectations of CEOs and executives and HR systems. From a CEO's perspective, they saw HR as one, one system, but the research showed that the average organization had 12 different systems in their HR stack. And because of that, HR was very disjointed, it was very difficult to pass data across workflows were inefficient, and at the end of the day, people couldn't do basic functions out of HR. So the vision of day force was to solve that, start with a single data model and build first the compliance modules and then the talent module so it would have that end to end, solution all on that single database model. And that's how we got to where we are today. And just amazing how long you've been in the space. I haven't told you this, but I did do some reference checks on you before we did the deal. And people that have been in the space for many years that are excellent operators said there is no innovator like you in the entire space. That is just awesome. Well, that's actually very flattering. Thank you. And it's true. We've seen it be true. By the way, thank you. Thank you. I also find it amazing that this space is not new. Some people may even call it mature and the kind of innovation you can have through simplicity and really understanding it has been unbelievable. What inspired you? So I did a lot of research at the very beginning of day force and the research was to answer the question, what do we build first? So we did an analysis in terms of life of customer by module. And we found that the longest life of customer was co HR, payroll, time and benefits. And the feel was if we could build those modules and do it very, very well, we could then extend the solution into talent and align the life of customer across the talent modules to that of payroll workforce management. As I started to look at payroll, I came across taxes. And taxes, particularly in the United States, is like the Wild West. After the time we were building day force, there were about 15,000 jurisdictions in the US alone. Every jurisdiction did exactly what it wanted to do, how it wanted to do it. And it wasn't really much documentation. And if you wouldn't get it right, the penalties were just ridiculously high, about 3% of the liability file per day. So if you're dealing with a very large company where you might have a pair of say a billion dollars, you could be looking at 30, 40 million dollars or penalties per day. Again, lot of research and I come across two organizations that do tax as well, Suridium being one. But when I look at the broader Suridium organization, it was evident that the company was having a few challenges. The company had been taken private in 2007, a lot of debt, not really a lot of product innovation. Revenue was declining. You had the financial crisis in 2008 that had impacted the float income. And so it was for me a bit of an opportunity. So I approached the owners of Suridium at the time. And the construct was very simple. The idea was I could use the cash flow from the core payroll business to fund the developmental day force. I could use the customers on their payroll business as really a source of customers. And we always know selling to a existing customer is cheaper and more effective than going out and finding new customers. And the tax asset I could keep and I could modernize and I could build that directly into the day force platform. And we did that by 2017. Groups like Gardner were recognizing us as the leader in compliance, payroll, workforce management, taxes. And then in 2018, we obviously took the company public and we started to extend into the full end to end talent. And by the way, the moat around taxes has just continued to grow. And based on the knowledge of the Suridium team, we were able to build out the day force tax engine that does something called tax locator, which is if I'm working in one location living at different or move around, it determines which taxes are applicable to the piece of work that I've done. And then we had the tax engine which also applies the actual rates and the rules as how you do the tax calculations. And that really gave us a very, very strong advantage. And we got all this great knowledge and these great people from Suridium. Just incredible because right now there's a big debate on just the incumbent win as technology shifts or does the new company, the startup or the new business of an advantage. And I think those things are overplayed. Here you did it with both. You had the innovator and the growing company and an incumbent that wasn't growing that much, that actually had a bunch of challenges. And you got the best of both worlds in it. It came together well on what brought us together was we came up with something called our way. What we wanted to do was to have a brand promise that would attract the best people to work with us and also to attract customers who would want to deliver on that particular brand promise to their people. We came up with the series of values very specific and tuned to the makeworks life better brand promise. And we chose the wording our way instead of the day falls way or the Suridium way to bring two very different cultures together because day falls obviously had that starter culture, very aggressive, very innovative. And with Suridium, you had an older organization that was more setting its ways and more conservative in the our way and the values around it, allowed to bring it all together and just get that great working environment and that great culture that I think has made us very successful. Look as long as you keep true, what's nice over here is we're playing in a really large market. And that large market really does create a lot of opportunity. So if I look at day falls today we have about a 4% market share growing very very aggressively. Differentiation really has allowed us to do a lot of value to our over 7,000 customers today and create a great reputation. If I'm a customer because once I remember we had a meeting around our animal meeting in that hotel, I saw that you opened up your laptop and you have the ROI for a bunch of customers. I'm like yes, that's what it's about making money, making it simpler, better, and making money for your customers. If I'm a company with 100,000 employees, what's so special about you and what's the ROI of going with day four versus staying with some other vendor? So we go into a particular customer and we determine what the cash IRR will be for the customer and where that comes from is we say okay you've got an incumbent system which might have up to 12 different components. So by that I mean they have one system for HR and one for peril and one full time and one full scheduling and one full recruiting and one full performance management and so on and for each of those systems they're paying a subscription. They have someone who has to run the product internally. They have to have a way of doing data integration and a way of doing data aggregation and when we come in we're able to reduce the total subscription that the customers paying by the time you go live you're saving quite considerably in terms of your annual subscriptions and when we look at the three year life or the five year life of the contract you're looking at a cash IRR of about 200 to 300%. Well I wish I could invest like that and we call it Quantify Valley and it keeps us I think very very honest. So when we build a specific piece of functionality for us we have to kind of identify what is that KPI that we can impact at the customer and how is that going to translate into a cash savings. An example for that would be like the day full swallet. So we look at the day full swallet which is all other systems you have a time system that captures the time and the data sets the time system until after the end of the pay period and then the payroll team comes in after the end of the pay period and they do their busy work to try to get a high quality of pay. The first opportunity we saw was bringing time and pay together this continuous calculation engine which meant that the payroll team could start auditing the pay from the beginning of the pay period as opposed to after the very end and that turned out to be case what we found out from that were able to lower the cost of payroll by 80%. It's huge huge number while raising the quality but as it pertains to the actual wallet another outcome was that the employees could see exactly how much they had earned, nettle taxes and all the different deductions and benefits during the active pay period and the day full swallet was the next step which was well if the employee can actually see what they're making why didn't we allow them to get paid at end of shift. Great great benefit for the employee because it avoids all the pay day loans and allows them to bridge their finances between different pay periods and for an organization the impact was a drop in attrition we were able to lower the turnover the voluntary turnover of employees by between 20 to 40%. depending on industry. So you say, what does that mean? Well, if I go to say a hospitality company, 50,000 employees, they may have a turnover of 60%. Right? So they go in through 30,000 people per year that they have to recruit, they have to onboard, they have to train. If we're able to lower that by 20%, the savings to the organization is tremendous and that ties back to quantifiable value. Incredible. What a consistent product with the work life, make work life better, with that promise and that concept. And you see that, right? You see the qualities both making work life better for the people and at the same time you're delivering on that quantifiable value, which I think is very important from a customer perspective. It's incredible. David, switching gears a little bit, you and I have spoken a lot about AI. You have been coding for a long time, so you are very, very technical as well. Is this good or bad for your business? For us, we have two objectives for AI. The first is we want to accelerate revenue and the second is we want to increase profitability. If I bring that to life, if I bring it to 2026, we're very confident that in 2026, we're going to see our revenue accelerate by 30%. Our revenue growth rate goes up by 30% year over year. And we also are very confident that our EBITDA is going to increase by almost 70% this year. And so how do we do that? We infuse AI throughout the product and by doing that, we can really drive that quantifiable value to our customers, but also it allows us to actually build more products, and then there's the internal aspect of it as well. So if I bring it down completely, if I look at the product and technology group and I look at what our cheat product and technology officer has done, well, it allows him to basically reduce the number of people that he has in each of his sprint teams, and at the same time reduce the actual duration of the sprint. AI has allowed him to effectively lower the line so more of these growth products and projects are now being delivered with inside the same budget envelope that we have. The second thing that Joe has allowed him to do is if you're actually building, you want to have as much automated testing as many unit tests as you can around your actual products. And most organizations, even like us, would be around a 40-50% level. AI allows us to lift that to 80% to means each time we actually do deployment, the fewer regressions. Fewer regressions means we lift up the customer experience that leads to higher net promoter's schools, which allows our client-based team to go back to the group to happier customers, and to obviously sell them more. From a product perspective, we obviously are very lucky because when we started building the company of our focus was on the central data model, one well-formed data model. And you're going to data model now between QHR and you're going between workforce management and payroll and benefits and etc. And in order to use the language models today, you need that data all in one spot. And so that's allowed us to move very, very quickly. We have the day force assistant with inside the actual product, which allows a person, and the person could be a front line worker, a front line manager, an executive, an HR professional to ask any question about the data that they have access to. And in systems like us, which are controlled from a regulatory perspective, their privacy, their data residency, challenges as well, all of these very, very difficult things to do wrong. Our data model knows what data the person's allowed to see. And so when they ask a question, and answer this, I could say, "Hey, who are my employees?" I could then say, "What's the average salary?" Is there a correlation between salary and performance? Is there a correlation between tenure and performance? We study, we're in the business of studying these fields and you're so way ahead of the competition. Again, it comes down to simplicity, clarity or purpose. But again, for us, any type of AI decision, and I think this is very, very key, has to come down to either increase in revenue or increase in profitability or preferably it does both. Exactly. Clarity of purpose. Why are you doing this from a business perspective? Is it adding so much value to the customers? That's the revenue. If it's adding business value, it's got to be the margin, the profitability. Well said, I want to end with something that I'm extremely grateful for, is that we did this deal together. Thank you. So that we get to be shareholders in your company. Tell us a bit about how you made that decision. So we're at a point in time where there's a lot of what I'll call variability in decisions. And in the public markets, you already are driven on a quarterly mindset. And a company like us, as you know, we have tremendous predictability in our revenue and our profitability. So our guys, we're really just a few million dollars a part. And this is on a, you know, a 2.2 billion dollar company. So we would always be chasing that last 100,500,000 dollars of revenue and they lost few hundred thousand dollars of profitability. In order to deliver on the AI, kind of increase revenue and increase profitability, some of the investments are on a longer horizon. And this allows us to do that. By the way, there's a lot of knowledge within the top of our brotherhood team. Across the decades, I guess, of working more software companies, there is some very, very powerful insight. First time I met with Holden, he came back and said, you know, I think there's efficiencies over here. And Jeremy and I walked out and we were like, my god, the god, this is just common sense. But that was awesome. We did exactly what he thought about. That was awesome because Holden goes, they did it. And I'm like, they did what? Yeah, we talked about this and they went up and did it. Yeah, so you do that. And little things, as you know, we've done the transition from per employee per month, billion to subscription. And we're meeting with Eric on the operational team and Eric's okay. You know, you have to think three years, five years of board because you can't do a price increase of 30% to the customer three years from now. So how do you factor that into your subscription agreements? And that's something that we would not, we wouldn't really have thought about. So you've got now this great wealth of knowledge that's been gathered across so many of these portfolio companies that our brothers worked with over years and we're able to benefit from that. I appreciate what you said. And the other day, the Tomo Bravo team was updating me that there's been a bunch of new investments in AI, which we are just incredibly excited about. So David, thank you again for your inspiring leadership, your incredible partnership, your trust. And we're just so happy to be with one of the best technology companies in the world. And it goes both ways. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thanks so much. Listen to Tomo Bravo's Behind the Deal season four on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.