Everyone said she needed venture capital. Eleven years later, she’s building a unicorn without it

Everyone said she needed venture capital. Eleven years later, she’s building a unicorn without it

A founder raises seed capital, grows quickly, raises another round and repeats the process until an acquisition or public listing comes into view. Venture capital has become so deeply woven into the startup ecosystem that it is often treated as a milestone rather than simply one of many ways to finance growth.

Lilia Stoyanov never accepted that assumption. Long before founding TFY, she had already built a successful international career in financial technology, holding senior leadership positions, including GM & CFO at Skrill during one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintech success stories.

She understood how venture-backed companies scaled, the advantages institutional investment could bring and the expectations that often came with it. When investors showed interest in her business, the decision she made surprised many people.

She declined. Not because funding wasn’t available, but because she wanted the freedom to build differently.

Rather than allowing investment cycles to dictate strategy, she wanted customers to shape the company’s future. Profitability, she believed, would provide resilience. Independence would create room to think long-term. Decisions could be guided by purpose as much as performance.

It was never a rejection of venture capital. Rather, it was a belief that it wasn’t the only path to building an extraordinary company. More than a decade later, that philosophy has become one of TFY’s defining characteristics.

Recognised among the UK’s soon-to-be unicorns and ranking on FT1000: Europe’s Fastest-Growing Companies 2026, the company has quietly grown into a global workforce technology business serving organisations in more than 180 countries while remaining independently financed. Yet, its greatest achievement may not be its growth but the assumptions it has challenged along the way.

When Stoyanov founded TFY in 2015, the conversation around work looked very different. Remote work was still considered an exception. Cross-border hiring remained administratively complex. Building international teams often requires businesses to navigate multiple providers for recruitment, payments, compliance and workforce management.

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Stoyanov believed something more fundamental was happening. The world’s talent was becoming increasingly distributed. The companies that succeeded would not necessarily be those with the biggest offices. They would be those capable of bringing together the best people, wherever they lived. That belief shaped TFY from the beginning.

Today, the company helps organisations build connected workforces — global teams of independent professionals with entrepreneurial mindsets who contribute specialised expertise across borders. Rather than stitching together disconnected systems, businesses can manage talent acquisition, contractor management, compliant international payments, workforce analytics and recruitment through a single platform designed for a global labour market.

Stoyanov prefers to talk about independent professionals rather than freelancers, and that distinction matters.

Independent professionals, she notes, bring specialist expertise, commercial awareness and entrepreneurial thinking to organisations that increasingly require flexibility without compromising quality. They are not temporary labour; they are an integral part of how modern businesses innovate and compete.

For TFY, technology exists to help organisations connect with that talent, not to create additional barriers between employers and the people capable of helping them grow.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping recruitment. For many organisations, the appeal is obvious. AI can review thousands of applications in minutes, automate repetitive administrative tasks and significantly accelerate hiring.

But speed alone does not guarantee better decisions. Stoyanov believes the conversation around AI has become too narrowly focused on efficiency. The more important question, she argues, is whether technology helps organisations recognise human potential that traditional recruitment processes often overlook.

That philosophy sits at the heart of TFY’s approach to ethical AI. Rather than using artificial intelligence solely to eliminate candidates who don’t match predefined keywords, the company’s technology looks beyond conventional career paths. It identifies transferable skills, adjacent experience and capabilities that suggest someone could succeed even if their CV does not perfectly mirror a job description.

The difference is subtle but profound. Traditional recruitment software often asks: “Does this person fit this job?”

TFY’s ethical AI asks: “Where could this person’s potential create the greatest value?”

The recruiter remains firmly in control, and artificial intelligence becomes a decision-support tool rather than a decision-maker. That distinction has become increasingly important as organisations seek to balance technological innovation with fairness, transparency and trust.

For Stoyanov, ethical AI should never replace human judgement. It should expand it. Technology should help recruiters discover people they might otherwise overlook, reduce bias by broadening the pool of talent under consideration and encourage skills-based hiring rather than simply rewarding conventional career histories. In other words, ethical AI should unlock human potential.

That philosophy earned Stoyanov recognition as AI Entrepreneur of the Year at the 2025 Allica Bank Great British Entrepreneur Awards and an Innovate UK grant in 2020, reflecting her contribution to advancing responsible AI within workforce technology. More importantly, it illustrates a wider belief that has guided TFY from the beginning: technology delivers its greatest value when it helps more people participate in meaningful work rather than excluding them from it.

Long before “purpose-driven business” became fashionable boardroom language, TFY was already asking a different question. What if technology could help people rebuild their lives?

In 2016, as Europe grappled with the Syrian refugee crisis, the company launched Rebuild Lives, an initiative designed to help displaced people access legitimate remote employment and receive compliant international payments. The idea was simple but powerful: while humanitarian aid provides immediate relief, meaningful work restores independence, confidence and dignity.

Years later, when war displaced millions of Ukrainians, that philosophy was tested again.