This HR tech startup has raised $70M since the beginning of this year to keep up with its “dramatic growth”

London, UK and San Francisco, CA-based company Oyster, an HR platform designed for globally-distributed companies, announced that it has raised $50M (approx €41.85M) in its Series B round of funding.

This round reportedly values the company at a $475M (nearly €398M) valuation — six times its valuation after its previous funding round. 

The development for Oyster comes right after it raised $20M (approx €16.7M) in Series A round earlier this year in February. The company says, “this is a major milestone for our rapidly growing company and a signal to the market that the future truly is distributed.”

The Investors

The round was led by Stripes, a growth equity firm based in New York. Besides, existing investors, including Emergence Capital, The Slack Fund, as well as Avid Ventures, have also participated in this round.

Capital utilisation

The funding from this round will help Oyster to expand its services and offer an end-to-end human experience. 

In a statement, Tony Jamous, co-founder of Oyster, says, “By making global HR a delightful experience, we can lower the barrier to people hiring outside their own country and enable talent around the world to benefit from increasing their employability. Right now, we enable companies to hire, pay, and take care of employees in more than 180 countries worldwide. And this new investment will allow us to continue to empower globally distributed companies to succeed on the world stage.”

Oyster aims to remove the barriers to global employment

Hiring on a global level means jumping local hurdles. By understanding the specifics of local markets Oysters can help bring people from ‘job offered’ to ‘onboarded’ within a week.

Founded in 2020 by Jack Mardack and Tony Jamous, Oyster is a distributed HR platform that allows companies to hire, employ, and retain talented employees globally. Jamous says, “We’re on a mission to remove the barriers to global employment so that talented people across the globe can increase their employability no matter where they are.”

With the company’s software platform, you can hire remote full-time employees anywhere in the world, provide fully-compliant payroll as well as give your “valued remote hires” the benefits and perks they deserve. Besides payroll and benefits, the Oyster platform also manages local legal compliance, and other critical human resource needs specific to every country.

Oyster is motivated by the opportunity for positive social impact. Removing these barriers makes the world a better place in three ways: it helps redress inequalities of access to opportunity; allows for the distribution of wealth to places other than the major cities of the world; and, supports the environmentally-friendly and business-smart shift to remote working.

Recent developments

Oyster’s growth in the last year has been surging. The company’s team has grown by 5X, and its customer base has grown by 8X so far in 2021. Oyster has also witnessed a surge in its revenue by 6X since the beginning of the year. 

Additionally, Oyster has also expanded its distributed HR offerings to include multiple modes of employment (for both contractors and full-time employees) and an assortment of benefits for the special needs of distributed teams.

Besides, the company says it has also expanded its country coverage to 91 countries which accounts for more than 95 per cent of the employable knowledge workers of the world. The countries include India, Egypt, Peru, the Philippines, Lebanon, Thailand, and Nigeria, among others from the developing world.