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Greg Rosenke on Unsplash
Tech startup company Remote, which helps companies hire employees anywhere in the world, raised $150 million in its latest funding round, pushing the company into unicorn status with a valuation of more than $1 billion.
“This milestone reflects the commitment and passion of our global team, but funding is just the beginning,” wrote co-founder and CEO Job van der Voort in a blog post announcing the news on July 13. “We intend to use this money to make it even easier for businesses to hire the best global talent.”
The latest funding round caps off a remarkable rise for Remote. Van der Voort, a former product executive at GitLab, founded the company in 2019 in San Francisco alongside fellow software engineer Marcelo Lebre, with the goal to be the “most trusted resource for remote job seekers, contractors, employees and employers” Lebre said in April 2020 in an announcement of the company’s initial $11 million seed funding round.
The company subsequently closed a $35 million Series A funding round just a few months later in November 2020. The latest funding, a Series B round, was led by Accel and included investments from a who’s who of tech investors, including Sequoia, Index Ventures, Two Sigma, General Catalyst and Day One Ventures. Investors are clearly seeing opportunity in the rise of remote, asynchronous work among distributed global teams.
Remote’s platform aims to simplify the hiring process and help companies build a multinational team by handling payroll, benefits, compliance and taxes across international markets. “In order to legally hire someone in another country, you need to create a local entity, learn about local labor laws, run local payroll and find a local attorney to create a compliant employment contract,” van der Voort said in 2020. “It’s tedious, and it’s prohibitively expensive.”
The pandemic-fueled rise of remote working has been a catalyst for the company’s growth. According to company statistics, Remote has now set up shop in 50 countries and multiplied its user base 10 times in eight months. Revenue also grew by 65x over the past year and the internal team expanded from 50 employees to 220 operating in 45 countries. The new funding round will help the company to expand to 80 countries by the end of 2021, van der Voort said, with the goal of complete global coverage in 2022.
Remote also announced the launch of Global Employee API, a service that allows HR and payroll companies to use Remote’s global employment structure within their own products and platforms. HR platform Rippling is an early partner. Remote also struck a partnership with applicant tracking system and recruiting software Greenhouse to integrate their employee information data and support Remote customers’ onboarding processes.
Van der Voort said the company also has plans to expand its advisory services with legal experts who can help clients get up to speed on local business culture and labor laws across the world, in addition to providing guidance on benefits, incentive planning, visa and immigration support, and employee relocation. There are also plans to build a financial services product to handle international payroll processes and enable payouts and stock option payment plans.
“Remote is at the center of a profound shift in the way companies hire,” said Miles Clements, partner at Accel, in a press statement. “We’re excited to partner with the global leader in the quickly emerging category of remote work.”
