Remote raises $300M more, now at a $3B+ valuation, to manage payments and more for globally distributed workforces

In the last several years, remote workforces have come into their own, with companies ever more willing to tap into talent wherever it happens to be, and a vast array of low-friction tools being built to make those distributed teams work just as effectively as if they were all in the same In other words, tech that helps companies with some of the trickiest aspects of managing a remote workforce is announcing.

The startup raised $300 million to continue building out the tools that it provides to its customers and to expand its technology and services to more countries. The SoftBank Vision Fund 2 is leading the round, with previous investors such as Accel, Sequoia, and Index Venture Partners also participating. The Series C values Remote at over $3 billion.

It has been less than a year since Remote raised $150 million in a round at a $1 billion valuation. The focus distributed work has had particularly in the last couple years, a trend that was already in pace before Covid-19, but definitely accelerated as a result of it.

The company is based out of San Francisco but has a completely remote workforce, with revenues up 13x in the last year. Even as offices gradually reopen and many parts of the world look to return to pre-covid routines, the pace is not slowing down.

There is evidence that some of the funding exuberance of the last couple of years around pandemic-spurred theses is getting more bearish at the other end of the tech world spectrum. The trend seems to have passed over Remote, which raised this round in the last quarter.

The power dynamics have completely changed between employers and employees, with people more able to work from wherever they want, and companies needing to provide remote working facilities to secure, according to Remote CEO Job van der Voort. Maybe we couldn't have raised this much if there was a slow down in that trend.

GitLab, DoorDash, Hello Fresh, Loom and Paystack are just a few of the companies that use Remote to process payments. Services it offers today include payroll, benefits, taxes and local compliance for contractors and full-time employees.

Job van der Voort, the CEO who co-founded Remote with Marcelo Lebre, said that the aim is to expand.

The world of work has a longstanding challenge that has been worsened by globalization. When they are not based out of a company's main office and country, and potentially not in any office at all but at home, it can be a tricky business. Typically, companies have addressed this by working with local employment companies who have handled various processes manually for them, which led to an expensive and fragmented approach that ultimately held companies back from wanting to embark on the process at all; or not following policies that would be more beneficial for the company and its

Van der Voort, who was the VP of product at GitLab, was a supporter of remote work, but also someone who understood those challenges first-hand, and he helped to build that organization's remote team to 450 employees from just five. Lebre was the VP of engineering for Unbabel, a company that builds tools for companies to communicate with a global customer base, where he worked with a distributed team and saw the opportunity of addressing this area in a better way.

Papaya Global, Oyster, Deel, HackerRank, and Turing are some of the tech companies that are tackling different aspects of remote employment. The unique selling point of remote is that it builds its stack from the ground up and provides an employer with all of its services in the cloud.

The company's pace of growth in terms of its footprint speaks to both the complexity and challenges of building out services like these, as well as the integrated approach that Remote has taken in doing so.

It is very difficult to open a new country and sometimes the reasons for a delay are out of our control, Van der Voort said.

The integrated approach speaks to the tech chops of the company. Van der Voort noted that Papaya Global made an acquisition of Azimo to bring money transfer services into its own fold.

The shift to remote and hybrid work has enabled companies to hire from anywhere in the world, but this can be an intensive, costly and risky process. We are excited to support Job and the team in their mission to open up the vast potential of the world for everyone.