The math problem that started everything was literally a math problem. Nurasyl Serik, then a university student at the University of Surrey, built an app called Felix Math - point your phone camera at an equation, get a step-by-step solution back. The AI worked. He exited it. Then he went looking for the next wall to knock down.
He found it not in code, but in paperwork. While bootstrapping startups across the UK, Serik kept hitting the same invisible border: hiring anyone outside your country meant navigating a labyrinth of local labor laws, compliance requirements, and payroll infrastructure that varied by jurisdiction. The pain wasn't hypothetical - it was his pain. And he suspected it was everyone's pain.
In 2021, he co-founded RemoFirst alongside Ukrainian entrepreneur Volodymyr Fedoriv. The company's thesis was deceptively simple: a business should be able to hire anyone, anywhere in the world, without needing an army of local lawyers. RemoFirst would handle the compliance, the payroll, the benefits, the work permits - all of it - so the hiring company just had to make the offer.
The price point was a deliberate provocation. Legacy Employer of Record providers - the incumbents who had dominated global payroll for decades - were charging four-figure monthly minimums. Serik bet that most of that cost was margin, not complexity. RemoFirst built the compliance infrastructure, found the right local partners, and passed the savings to customers. Today, a company can hire a full-time employee in 185+ countries starting at $199 per month.
Before walking into any VC meeting, Serik and Fedoriv had already proved the market. RemoFirst was bootstrapped to seven-figure ARR - a rare discipline in an era of growth-at-all-costs startups. When they finally raised outside capital, in September 2022, they came with proof, not a pitch deck. The $14.1M seed round, co-led by Mouro Capital and QED Investors, was reported at the time as the largest seed raise in the entire EOR industry. Serik wasn't asking for validation. He was picking partners.
Then came the acceleration. Between the seed close and the March 2024 Series A, ARR grew 10 times over. Octopus Ventures led the $25M Series A, joined again by QED, Mouro, and Counterpart Ventures. In the same month the round closed, Forbes announced Serik and Fedoriv as 30 Under 30 honorees in Enterprise Technology - a recognition that, if anything, understated the arc. Fast Company would name RemoFirst the #4 Most Innovative Company in Human Resources for 2025.
The platform now serves companies ranging from Fortune 500 giants - Microsoft, Mastercard, BCG - to the UN's World Health Organization and the University of Cambridge. Its partner network has processed more than $30 billion in international payroll. RemoFirst covers full-time employment in 185+ countries, contractor management in 150+ countries, global health insurance through RemoHealth, visa and work permit support through RemoVisa (expanded in early 2026 to 110+ countries), and background checks in 180 countries through RemoCheck.
Serik's philosophy - he calls it the "Freedom of Work" - holds that geographic location should be as irrelevant to employment as the color of your office chair. His own daily routine models it: breakfast with his spouse, a walk with their dog, then a day of connecting with a distributed team that stretches across time zones. He runs minimal meetings, guards flow time for his team, and responds to investors within 24 hours. Chess is the hobby he keeps. Traction by Gabriel Weinberg is the book he revisits when the company is scaling fast enough to make the original lessons feel fresh again.
The story of RemoFirst is, at bottom, the story of someone who kept noticing that the border between an idea and its execution was usually administrative, not intellectual. Compliance isn't glamorous. HR infrastructure isn't a dinner table topic. But for 190 employees at RemoFirst, and for the tens of thousands of workers around the world whose employment runs through its platform, it is the entire infrastructure of professional life. Serik just decided someone had to fix it - and it may as well be him.