Remote sells the paperwork that lets talent stay put

The awkward part of an international hire arrives after the exciting part. You have met the candidate. You like the work. You agree on a salary. Then somebody asks a question with the charm of a customs form: which company, in which country, is actually going to employ this person?

Remote lives inside that question. The internet made it cheap to find a colleague abroad; employment remained stubbornly local. The company supplies the contracts, payroll, benefits administration, and employing entities that let a business turn a promising conversation into a job. A border can be invisible on a screen and quite visible on a payslip.

01 / The office disappeared. The employer did not.

Job van der Voort and Marcelo Lebre founded Remote in 2019. Van der Voort had been vice president of product at GitLab; Lebre had led engineering at Unbabel. Both came from businesses accustomed to distributed work. They had good reason to distinguish a collaboration problem from an employment problem.

A shared document can travel without permission. A job has obligations attached to it: local contracts, employer contributions, leave, benefits, and the ownership of work produced by an employee. The charming instruction “hire the best person anywhere” becomes rather less charming when somebody must implement it.

Remote’s answer was to build the local machinery. In its EOR arrangement, a Remote-owned entity becomes the legal employer, while the customer directs the employee’s daily work. The customer can hire without first establishing its own subsidiary in that country. That is especially useful when the opportunity is one excellent person, rather than an entire new office.

02 / Owning the dull parts

Remote’s distinguishing pitch is ownership. It says it owns the entities used for its EOR service rather than relying on third-party employers. In July 2021, it reported 50 entities, including 32 added since the previous November. This is an unusually tangible thing for a software company to build: a network of actual employers underneath the interface.

The practical appeal is a more direct chain of responsibility. Contracts, employee questions, and intellectual-property arrangements sit within infrastructure Remote controls. Ownership does not make a payroll error impossible. It does give a buyer a concrete question to ask: who is responsible, and how many organizations stand between us and the employee?

There is a cost to such a choice. The entities and expertise must exist before the customer can use them. Remote’s early fundraising helped finance that expansion: $11 million in seed funding and $35 million in Series A funding in 2020, followed by $150 million in July 2021. Its April 2022 Series C added $300 million at a valuation near $3 billion. That valuation belongs to that funding event, rather than serving as today’s price tag.

The company also encountered the less decorative side of growth. Layoff trackers record around 100 job cuts, approximately 9% of its workforce, in July 2022. Raising a large round did not protect Remote’s own staff from a reduction. The record makes a sober point: a company selling employment infrastructure still has to manage the economics of employing its own people.

03 / The benefit you can take to the bank

The most revealing customer example concerns something much more ordinary than international expansion. In a published Loom case study, its people leader Meghana Reddy described a team of 15 spread across 11 countries. A modest headcount had become a substantial geography lesson.

Loom used Remote to convert several contractors into employees. Reddy connected the change to recognizable parts of adult life: obtaining a mortgage, building a pension, and feeling able to stay at the company. An employment contract can be an infrastructure product for the employer and a source of stability for the person signing it.

“We had 15 people in 11 different countries.”

Meghana Reddy / Loom, in Remote’s case study

This is also where the customer’s reasoning becomes interesting. The choice was about giving international colleagues a better experience, alongside navigating local rules. Converting a contractor changes a relationship; merely paying that contractor more conveniently does not. A buyer needs to decide which problem needs solving before admiring the software.

04 / Three menus, three different relationships

Remote serves startups, smaller businesses, and enterprises. Public customer examples include Loom, GitLab, Jeeves, and Fonoa. Their requirements need not match. One organization may need an employer for a single overseas hire. Another may have its own foreign entities but want fewer payroll systems. A third may work with genuinely independent contractors.

Contractor of Record, launched in January 2025, introduces another arrangement: Remote takes on contractor engagement and administration, including a classification assessment. Its support documentation says the contractor agreement is with Remote or a Remote-designated subcontractor. The distinction matters because the EOR ownership claim should not be casually extended to every product bearing the Remote name.

Remote adds employee records and time-off tools, benefits support, equity services, and relocation assistance around these relationships. Its expertise combines software with employment operations, payroll, and local knowledge. The subscription interface is only the visible end of that work.

05 / The fee is not the payslip

At the researched USD list price, EOR costs $699 per employee per month. Global Payroll lists $29, and basic Contractor Management lists $29 per active contractor per month. They buy different services and carry different responsibilities. Treating those prices as interchangeable is a fine way to produce a wonderfully cheap, completely wrong spreadsheet.

For EOR, salary and other employment costs sit alongside the service fee. For Global Payroll, Remote’s pricing page specifies an implementation fee and a recurring payroll delivery fee. Currency conversion can affect invoices too. The useful comparison is the complete cost for the same person, country, and arrangement.

As an operational judgment, EOR is appealing when opening an entity would be disproportionate to the hiring need. As a team in one country grows, the buyer can compare continuing service fees with its own entity and payroll operations. Remote’s payroll offering gives it a role on either side of that decision. No universal headcount settles the question.

06 / The platform behind somebody else’s platform

Remote competes in the global employment and payroll market alongside Deel, Oyster, Papaya Global, and Multiplier. Its positioning centers on owned EOR infrastructure and a growing suite of workforce services. Coverage, contract terms, support, and the precise product matter more than a generic country count.

It also distributes infrastructure through other HR companies. Gusto and Personio use Remote Embedded for global employment offerings. White-label options and prebuilt Flows let partners introduce these capabilities inside their own products. A customer can therefore encounter Remote as an underlying service rather than as the main destination for its HR team.

The expansion became more physical in 2026. January’s Atlas acquisition brought expense-management technology into the company. April’s Bravas acquisition added identity and device-management expertise. In the announcement, Remote said it was still mapping how Bravas would integrate. These deals show the intended direction; they do not establish that every promised capability was already delivered.

The logic is easy to follow. A new employee needs a contract, pay, access to systems, and equipment. Bringing those processes together could reduce handoffs. It also gives Remote more work to execute well. A larger menu is useful only when the underlying service remains dependable.

07 / What to borrow before you buy

There is a practical lesson here for businesses that never become customers. Separate the employment relationship from the tools used to administer it. Name the legal employer. Check country-specific availability. Price the whole arrangement. Assign someone to resolve exceptions. These are mundane habits, which is precisely why they travel well.

Remote’s own distributed culture offers another habit to borrow: written decisions that colleagues can understand without attending every meeting. Its public engineering accounts describe asynchronous work, and its GitHub organization publishes software tools. A provider can handle payroll; the customer still has to build a team whose work survives time zones.

The conditions matter. A role requiring physical presence cannot become location-independent by changing payroll vendors. A contractor label cannot repair a relationship that should be employment. Relocation still requires eligibility checks. Remote’s opportunity rests on making viable international hires easier to administer. The buyer’s first job is deciding whether the hire is viable.