Ashik Ahmed is the co-founder of Deputy, one of Australia’s best-known workforce technology companies. Before starting Deputy, he took on shift work at Hungry Jack’s and built tech solutions in Sydney.
That hands-on experience gave him something most founders lack. He understood the challenges shift workers dealt with, while also seeing the difficulties business owners had when managing staff. So when he co-founded Deputy in 2008, the platform tackled actual problems from both sides.
In this article, we’ll cover Ashik Ahmed’s personal story, how Deputy started, and why the company now operates in over 100 countries.
The Story Behind Deputy’s Founding: Ashik Ahmed and Steve Shelley’s Vision
Ashik Ahmed and entrepreneur Steve Shelley founded Deputy in 2008 after years of solving workforce problems together at an aviation company in Sydney. Their shared experience with shift workers and business operations influenced every part of the platform.
Below, we’ll break down the problem they spotted, how they built Deputy, and the vision that still drives the company.
A Workplace Challenge Became a Technology Solution
Before Deputy came along, many businesses relied on spreadsheets, phone calls, and paper rosters to manage their teams.
Creating employee schedules could take hours each week, and even small mistakes could lead to missed shifts, payroll errors, and unhappy customers. These problems were especially common in industries such as hospitality, retail, and aviation, where staff schedules often changed from day to day.
Ashik Ahmed lived through this himself. In 2003, he joined Aero-Care, an aviation ground handling company run by Steve Shelley in Sydney.
Aero-Care handled services such as baggage handling, cabin cleaning, and passenger support across several airports. But as the company grew from two people to more than 200 staff, managing so many shift workers became harder with outdated tools. Ahmed saw an opportunity to fix the problem, so he built an internal scheduling system called “Aero-net” to make staff management easier.
And the results spoke for themselves. After adopting the technology, the company expanded from 200 to nearly 1,400 staff in just three years. The technology helped the company manage that rapid expansion as the business grew. That experience showed Ahmed that the problem wasn’t limited to aviation.
Businesses in restaurants, retail, healthcare, and other industries also needed a simpler way to manage shift workers. This realisation would later become the foundation for Deputy.
How Ashik Ahmed and Steve Shelley Built Deputy Together
Ashik Ahmed and Steve Shelley came from different backgrounds, but their experience suited the problem they were trying to solve.
Ahmed brought the technical skills. He studied computer science at the University of Melbourne and spent years building software systems for complex operations. Shelley, on the other hand, brought the business experience. He started Aero-Care in 1992 by cleaning planes at Sydney Airport and grew it into Australia’s largest ground handling company (with around 2,000 staff).
That mix is what made the deputy co-founders click. One understood the code, and the other understood the customers. After Aero-Care sold to a private equity firm in 2008, the deputy co-founders launched Deputy as its own company.
Ahmed rebuilt the product from scratch while Steve took the chairman role. It’s the kind of founder partnership where both sides genuinely need each other, and Deputy wouldn’t exist without that balance.
Australia has produced plenty of strong co-founder stories like this one, from many different backgrounds. That includes the women featured in our look at female entrepreneurs in Australia.
The Early Vision Behind Deputy’s Workforce Management Platform
Deputy wasn’t built to ride a trend. Ahmed and Shelley had a clear goal from the start: make it easier for businesses and shift workers to manage their daily work. They had lived through that broken relationship at Aero-Care, where coordinating hundreds of workers across airports meant constant phone calls, last-minute changes, and wasted hours.
The numbers backed up their instinct. Around 2.7 billion shift workers make up roughly two-thirds of the global workforce. Yet only about 1% of tech investment goes into tools for that community. For Ahmed and Shelley, that gap showed there was a clear need for better technology built around shift work.
So they built Deputy as an Australian software company with a global mindset. The platform handled employee scheduling, timesheets, communication, and compliance right from the start.
And it focused on the workers most tech companies overlooked: people in retail, hospitality, healthcare, and other shift-based roles across Australia and beyond.
Ashik Ahmed, Deputy’s Leadership Team, and the Growth of an Australian Software Company
Under Ashik Ahmed’s leadership, Deputy grew from a small Sydney startup into a global Australian software company with over 375,000 workplaces on its platform. That kind of growth didn’t happen by accident. It took product evolution, a strong leadership team, and well-timed investment.
We’ll break down each of those below.
Growing Deputy Beyond Employee Scheduling
Deputy started as an employee scheduling tool, but it quickly became clear that businesses needed more than just a roster.
Customers in hospitality, retail, and healthcare kept asking for better ways to communicate with their shift workers, track hours, and stay on top of local labour laws. So the Deputy team listened and built those features one by one, week after week.
That gradual expansion changed what Deputy offered businesses. By the early 2020s, Deputy had grown beyond employee scheduling and offered several tools to help businesses manage their teams:
- Employee Scheduling: Managers could build staff rosters and adjust shifts as schedules changed.
- Timesheets: The platform recorded employee hours, giving businesses a simpler way to track time worked.
- Task Management: Daily duties could be assigned and monitored within the same platform.
- Payroll Integrations: Deputy connected with services such as Xero, MYOB, and QuickBooks to help businesses manage payroll.
With these tools in one platform, Deputy has grown from a scheduling product into a broader workforce management system. It now serves more than 1.5 million workers across over 100 countries.
Building a Leadership Team for Global Expansion
Ashik Ahmed started Deputy as a technical co-founder who wrote much of the early code himself. But as the company expanded into new markets across the US, UK, and Asia, running a global organisation required a completely different skill set. So over time, he moved from building software to building teams, hiring senior leaders, and managing operations in multiple countries.
Ahmed served as CEO from around 2017 to early 2023, a period when Deputy’s team grew to roughly 400 people across offices in Sydney, San Francisco, and London. That kind of founder-to-CEO transition is common among Australia’s young entrepreneurs who scale tech companies beyond their first product.
And that growth eventually led Deputy to bring in a new CEO. In February 2023, the company appointed Silvija Martincevic to lead its next stage of international growth. Martincevic brought more than 20 years of leadership experience from companies including Groupon and Affirm (where she worked on growing products across international markets). That experience aligned with Deputy’s expanding global business.
She’s now based at the company’s US headquarters in San Francisco and regularly works with the Sydney and London teams. Ahmed also moved onto Deputy’s board of directors, where he now serves in an advisory role to support the company’s long-term direction.
This change marked a new phase for Deputy. Martincevic took the lead on the company’s global operations, while Ahmed remained involved at board level.
Under Martincevic’s leadership, women now make up 80% of Deputy’s leadership team. This reflects a deliberate focus on female senior hires and promotions. Deputy says diverse leadership helps the company better understand its customers as it expands globally.
Recognition, Funding, and Questions Around Founder Wealth
Deputy’s growth caught the eye of both investors and major business publications along the way.
In 2019, the Australian Financial Review placed Ashik Ahmed at number 25 on its Young Rich List, with an estimated net worth of $148 million at the time. Forbes Australia also recognised Ahmed through its Forbes Technology Council, where he contributed articles on shift work and small business strategy.
On the investment side, Deputy went six years without raising external funding after its November 2018 Series B, before securing a new investment in March 2024. That’s when Express Employment Professionals (a major US staffing firm with over 40 years of history) put in US$37 million. The deal pushed Deputy’s valuation past US$1.1 billion and made it Australia’s first tech unicorn in two years.
Just one month later, Xero, the accounting software company, added another US$25 million to strengthen its partnership with Deputy.
Now, a lot of readers search for “Ashik Ahmed net worth” or “Deputy founder net worth,” and that’s fair enough. But it’s worth knowing that those figures are tied to the company’s market valuation, rather than a personal bank balance.
A founder’s estimated wealth rises and falls with their company’s valuation, and it doesn’t mean they can access that amount as cash. We’ve seen the same pattern with other Australian founders like Andrew Forrest, whose net worth figures change with Fortescue’s share price.
Ahmed himself has said that money was never the motivation. In his words, wealth is “an outcome of things happening” rather than something he did his work for. He added that his place on a rich list didn’t change “why I get out of bed every morning.”
Ashik Ahmed’s Next Chapter: Lessons From a Technology Entrepreneur
Ashik Ahmed’s story offers a useful look at how a founder can build a company from personal experience.
He arrived in Australia as a teenager and started out working shift jobs at Hungry Jack’s. Then, years later, he co-founded a tech company that now operates in over 100 countries. That kind of journey doesn’t happen by luck alone, and it offers lessons for anyone thinking about building a business.
The main takeaways from his path as an entrepreneur come down to a few things:
- Solve a problem that affects real people
- Get to know your customers well
- Build a team that can carry the business beyond you
These principles may sound simple, but they helped Ahmed and Shelley develop Deputy around a problem they had experienced themselves.
Deputy’s story also continues under new leadership as the company develops its workforce technology for shift workers around the world. Ahmed’s role has changed, but his early experience with the challenges of shift work remains part of the company’s story.
If you’re keen to read more stories about business growth and founders across Australia, Australian Business Magazine covers them every week.
Frequently Asked Questions About Ashik Ahmed and Deputy
Readers often have follow-up questions about Ashik Ahmed, Deputy, and the people behind the company. We’ve answered the most common ones below.
Who Owns Deputy?
Deputy is a privately held company, so no single person owns it outright. Co-founders Ashik Ahmed and Steve Shelley hold significant stakes, along with investors like IVP, OpenView, and Express Employment Professionals.
Both founders still hold board posts, with Shelley as chairman and Ahmed as a board member. As with most tech companies that take on external investment, ownership is split across founders, early employees, and institutional investors.
What Is Ashik Ahmed’s Net Worth?
Public estimates of Ashik Ahmed’s net worth vary depending on the source. In 2019, the Australian Financial Review placed his wealth at $148 million. But that figure is tied to Deputy’s valuation at the time, not a confirmed bank balance.
As the company’s valuation changes, so does the public image of a founder’s personal wealth. No official figure has been confirmed by Ahmed himself.
What Does Deputy Do?
Deputy is a workforce management platform that helps businesses schedule, communicate with, and support their shift workers.
The platform also covers timesheets, task management, and compliance with local labour laws. Over 375,000 workplaces use Deputy to run their daily operations, with customers in industries like hospitality, retail, and healthcare across more than 100 countries.
Why Is Ashik Ahmed Considered an Entrepreneur?
Ashik Ahmed is considered an entrepreneur because he identified a real workplace problem early in his career and built a tech company to solve it. He went from working shift jobs as a teenager to co-founding a billion-dollar organisation.
That ability to spot a gap in the market and make it into a product used by millions is what defines an entrepreneur.
What Is Ashik Ahmed’s Current Role at Deputy?
Ahmed stepped down as CEO in early 2023 and moved onto Deputy’s board of directors. His focus now is on long-term strategy and advisory support rather than day-to-day leadership.
Silvija Martincevic took over as CEO, and she leads Deputy’s global operations from the company’s San Francisco headquarters. Ahmed’s board role allows him to stay connected to the company he co-founded while the leadership team drives daily decisions.
How Did Ashik Ahmed Build Integrity at Deputy?
Deputy Ashik Ahmed built the company around a clear set of values from the start. Integrity at Deputy means treating shift workers with dignity and giving them the same quality of tools that office workers have always had.
That principle influenced how the organisation designs its products and serves its customers. Ahmed has spoken publicly about how enriching other people’s lives is what gives his own life meaning.
Does Deputy Serve Teachers and Other Shift Workers?
Yes. Deputy serves a wide range of shift-based roles, including teachers, healthcare workers, retail staff, and hospitality teams.
Even workers in childcare and aged care use the platform to manage their weekly schedules. On any given Sunday, thousands of workers across hospitality, retail, healthcare, and other shift-based industries are preparing for the week through Deputy. The platform was built for anyone whose work doesn’t follow a standard nine-to-five pattern.
Can You Join Deputy’s Board or Leadership Team?
Deputy doesn’t publicly advertise board posts, but the company does hire for senior leadership roles across its offices in Sydney, London, and New York. Most people find these openings through Deputy’s careers page or through industry connections and friends in the tech space.
The leadership team has grown significantly in recent years, and the company continues to add experienced leaders as it scales globally.
