Remote announces $11 million in seed funding

Today is a special day for the Remote team. We’re announcing an $11 million seed round led by Two Sigma Ventures, with participation from Index Ventures, General Catalyst, Liquid2, INKEF Ventures, Remote First Capital, and Sid Sijbrandij (CEO GitLab) and Jobert and Kirsten Abma (Co-founder HackerOne). The financing will be used to expand our onboarding platform and extend coverage to forty new markets by the end of 2020, including Canada, Germany, the United States, and France.

Villi, partner at Two Sigma Ventures, recorded a video from home on why he has chosen to invest in Remote:

Our founding story

Before starting Remote, I was part of the early team at GitLab and as VP of Product, I helped scale the company from a small team into the largest all-remote company in the world. The road to creating a truly global, fully distributed company was rocky. Early on, I made an offer to a very talented product manager based in Germany. Unfortunately, we had no way of hiring them legally. It took us a year to finally have our legal entity, find local labor law and payroll experts, and ensure that we were complying with local regulations before I could hire them. This challenge presented itself time and time again as we scaled GitLab to now 67 different countries.

At the same time, the shift towards remote work and a more global workforce was intensifying everywhere, not just at GitLab. Nowadays, companies understand that it’s not about finding the best talent in San Francisco, New York, Austin or Atlanta anymore. It’s about hiring the best talent in the world, wherever they may have chosen to live.

Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced a necessary shift to remote work for companies that had never considered it before. After the pandemic, remote will remain as the new normal.

Our inability to move fast and solve global employment issues in minutes instead of months was the driving force behind the vision to create a global infrastructure for remote employment. By solving global employment, we can ultimately create more remote work. I decided to team up with one of the most talented engineering leaders I know, Marcelo, and that’s how Remote was born.

Our mission and next steps

Today, our mission is to make global employment easy and help companies move fast, break down barriers and work efficiently. We enable teams to onboard global contractors and employees in minutes through the Remote platform and we take care of payroll, tax, benefits and compliance (see Remote's country list to see where we currently support employment).

Employers get a single invoice for all their remote employees, and employees receive local pay slips and benefits, in a fully compliant way. Remote’s pricing is transparent, predictable and affordable.

Over the rest of the year, we will continue investing heavily in building the most robust global employment platform in the world, and setting up our own local infrastructure in forty new markets. That includes local legal entities in every country as well as a network of trusted in-country legal partners and service providers who will enable our team and our customers to move fast while removing red tape and compliance risks.

Some recent things we’ve been working on:

• Reducing onboarding time for new employees to less than 3 minutes

• Paid-time-off tracking

• Fully automated payments for employees and contractors

• Integrating with expense cards and processors

• Adding support for Ireland, Denmark, and several states in the United States

Thank you for the incredible support over the past year, and for joining us in ultimately creating more remote jobs.

Job

CEO of Remote

• Find the press release here