Ashik Ahmed is the CEO of Sydney start up Deputy, the homegrown company pegged as a future $1 billion tech unicorn. Deputy as described by co-founder Steve Shelley… ‘is an all-in-one cloud based workplace management solution that helps businesses save time and money by eliminating manual processes by simplifying scheduling, time-sheets, tasking, performance management and communication. Deputy also dramatically reduces the time and effort to process payroll.’

They recently announced what they say is ‘Australia’s largest Series B funding round of $111 million and work with customers globally including McDonalds, Gelato Messina and Amazon (and even Qantas too), to streamline workplace admin from payroll to timesheets to shift swapping. 

Ashik says: 'Ten years ago, Steve Shelley and I founded Deputy with a single mission: to improve the working lives of business owners and their employees. We had identified a problem in Steve’s aviation business and built Deputy to fix it. In hindsight, we were naive to think that those problems were unique to Steve’s businesses only. We quickly realised that businesses small and large, from global retailers to your local coffee shop, were crying out for tools to take the trials and tribulations that come with employee management and simplify them through technology.'