Boris Krastev and Boris Borisov had a naming problem before they had a company problem. They shared a first name, came from small Bulgarian towns beside the Danube and went to Denmark to study. They also shared the ordinary founder's conviction that a clever product would make an ugly market behave. Their first attempt, SkillAchieve, measured workforce skills. Their second, JobDisrupt, used machine learning to match CVs with job descriptions. Neither became the answer. RemoteMore kept the obsession - who can do the work? - and changed the transaction.
The breakthrough was almost comically less futuristic. Instead of offering another job board or another résumé sorter, RemoteMore would screen technical people, present their salary expectations up front and let employers invite the plausible ones directly to interviews. The marketplace launched in 2019, when remote work was still a subculture rather than an executive memo. Today the company says it has screened more than 50,000 developers, lists more than 700 companies in its network and reports 1,200-plus matches. Those are RemoteMore's own counts, but they explain the machine it has spent years assembling.
The product is a shorter argument
RemoteMore sells to the person with an engineering plan and an empty chair: a CTO, head of engineering, security lead or operator at a growing company. The customer may need a backend engineer for a long engagement, a DevSecOps specialist for an urgent problem, or a full-time employee in a country where the company has no legal entity. The common problem is not access to LinkedIn. It is turning abundant profiles into one defensible hiring decision.
Candidates create one profile, document their skills and availability, pass a screening process and submit a short video meant to test remote-work fit. They do not spend the day refreshing a feed. Companies search a curated pool and send interview invitations. RemoteMore's salary-discovery pitch puts a pre-negotiated cost in view before the last interview, when discovering a budget mismatch is especially wasteful. The company has also advocated paid trials and evidence from real work over whiteboard theater.
“More people should have the possibility to work remotely.”Boris Borisov, co-founder
That is the clean mission. The messier expertise sits beneath it: technical recruiting, compensation by country, contractor classification, local payroll and the rhythms of distributed teams. Borders may disappear from the video call, but they return promptly on the invoice and tax form. RemoteMore's addition of contractor payroll and employer-of-record service turns that nuisance into recurring revenue. It also closes the loop: find the person, hire the person, then keep paying the person legally.
What it costs, in unusually plain numbers
The current pricing page is refreshingly specific about most of the meter. A full-time placement carries a 12.5 percent commission. A contract hire carries 15 percent. Contractor payroll starts at €15 per month; employer-of-record payroll starts at €349 per month. Security implementation support starts at €75 an hour, while security evaluations are quoted as fixed-scope, fixed-price work. Customers buying a full-time hire with EOR payroll are offered €100 off per month.
The menu exposes the business model. The marketplace earns when a hire happens. Payroll earns while the relationship continues. Security work earns when a buyer needs diagnosis or execution without a permanent team. Public filings from majority owner Professional Diversity Network also describe RemoteMore revenue from contracted programmers delivering custom software. This is more services-heavy than the word “platform” may suggest, but that can be an advantage: lean customers generally want the work completed, not another dashboard to tend.
The first thing that failed
SkillAchieve failed first, followed by JobDisrupt. The founders have described both as previous attempts rather than dressing them up as strategic research. The important change was not a sudden love of remote work - Krastev wanted the freedom to work from anywhere, and Borisov had worked remotely since 2016. What changed was their view of the sellable unit. Measuring skill and algorithmically matching documents were tools. A booked interview with a plausible, available, affordable engineer was an outcome.
The market then supplied a spectacular tailwind. RemoteMore entered APX, the early-stage program backed by Axel Springer and Porsche, and received a reported €50,000 investment in 2019. It reached the finals of Denmark's Venture Cup. In September 2021, Professional Diversity Network bought 45.62 percent of RemoteMore USA for an estimated $1.363 million. Further purchases in 2023 took PDN's reported stake to 72.62 percent, and a 2025 agreement contemplated another one million shares for $300,000 in PDN stock. Acquisition did not make RemoteMore famous. It did give a small Berlin-rooted marketplace a Chicago base, a US partner and a paper trail.
Why security was the logical next aisle
In April 2025, RemoteMore redesigned candidate profiles to feature certifications and specialist categories, then opened the network wider to security architects, security engineers, site reliability engineers and DevSecOps talent. The website now offers security evaluations, roadmaps, compliance support and implementation. On the surface this looks like a pivot from hiring into consulting. Underneath, the economics rhyme.
Security work is scarce, expensive to hire for and costly to postpone. A sales deal can stall over SOC 2 or ISO 27001 requirements. An understaffed platform team can know it has identity and access problems without knowing which five of 500 findings deserve attention. RemoteMore's pitch is to scope the blocker with an architect, bring in a specialist to fix it and, if necessary, recruit the person who will maintain it. That is its claimed difference from a large consultancy, a generic freelance market and an EOR-only provider: one path from diagnosis to talent to compliant engagement.
The database is not the moat. The useful thing is the sequence that turns a stranger into a budgeted interview.YesPress analysis
The five parts worth stealing
A founder can copy that sequence without copying the category. Choose a narrow labor market. Define the observable evidence that predicts success. Make price and availability visible before the buyer invests heavily. Charge on the completed outcome. Add compliance or operations only when it is the natural next obstacle. The discipline is subtraction: every step must remove a reason for the buyer to postpone.
Where the model stops working
RemoteMore is not an all-purpose answer to a confused hiring plan. A marketplace cannot repair a vague role, an absent manager or a company that treats time-zone overlap as someone else's problem. It is a poor fit when work must happen on-site, when local language or licensing rules dominate, or when procurement requires a giant vendor with owned entities everywhere. Security work also fails when a buyer wants the comfort of an assessment but will not fund remediation. A prioritized roadmap is still a list until somebody changes the system.
A defined technical role, distributed management habits, urgency, realistic pay and willingness to use a contractor or EOR structure.
An on-site mandate, mushy scope, bargain-only budget, no interview owner or a security report nobody intends to implement.
The company occupies an interesting seam in the market. Toptal, Arc and similar networks compete for vetted technical placements. Deel, Remote and Oyster compete for global employment infrastructure. Recruiters sell search. Boutiques sell security projects. RemoteMore is smaller and less polished than the category leaders, but its offer is coherent precisely because it crosses those borders. The company is betting that a lean buyer would rather make one call than assemble four vendors.
That bet will not suit every procurement department. It does, however, explain why the two failed ideas mattered. RemoteMore stopped trying to make hiring information more impressive and started making the hiring decision shorter. For a founder, that is the memorable lesson: customers rarely pay because your funnel contains more intelligence. They pay when it contains fewer reasons to worry.
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