Manage HR Magazine | Thursday, September 29, 2022
Remofirst raised 14.1 million USD to make it cheaper and easier for businesses helping to hire remote workers globally and fix payroll for remote-first teams.
FREMONT, CA: Remofirst celebrated a historical moment by announcing the largest seed round in the industry of 14.1 million USD. The round was co-led by two leading fintech investors—Mouro Capital and QED Investors.
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Founded in 2021 by Nurasyl Serik and Volodymyr, Remofirst is an employer-of-record provider, helping companies build remote teams in by hiring talent in countries where companies do not have an entity. Remofirst currently has a global footprint across over 150 countries. Their services entail handling payroll benefits, onboarding, taxes, and local compliance for clients so they can focus on growing their businesses.
As an employer of record, Remofirst functions to hire workers on behalf of businesses and, as Serik says, "handling everything to do with hiring a person in a company." Remofirst was founded to give businesses an affordable and comprehensive SaaS solution.
In 2021, the company raised a pre-seed round of USD 275K from angel investors and grew the company substantially in revenue while becoming cash-flow positive, with no customer churn in the first year, indicating a great customer experience. Remofirst is mostly focused on SMBs and working with organisations and includes Fortune 500 companies in its clientele.
Driven by the global pandemic and the development of tools for remote work, Remofirst CEO Serik is optimising the product experience by developing a payroll engine for an on-demand job search platform.
Leveraging his personal experience as a remote worker, Serik created a platform that enables companies and employees to work and hire remotely while staying on top of payroll and HR compliance globally with a few clicks. Regardless of many existing players in the global HR space, Serik asserts that Remofirst is the most cost-efficient provider, filling a crucial gap with current market conditions. It makes it simple for customers to understand what they are paying for and why and offers best-in-class customer support.
"More and more companies are going remote, and some can’t afford it,” says Serik.
Serik and his team believe they are increasing the total addressable market (TAM) by allowing more companies to go remote. Remofirst distinguishes itself from outsourcing by providing an infrastructure allowing companies to hire globally rather than being responsible for finding and managing employees and the entire admin work associated with it.
"We are passionate about helping our clients build global teams and we want to enable freedom of work," Serik added. "To make that a reality, we felt that it shouldn’t be cost-prohibitive for companies to access local hiring tools, support, and expertise around the globe. That is a core tenet of what we’re building at Remofirst, and the feedback from customers has proven we are onto something.”
Last year, Remofirst began the process of raising its seed round of funding with five employees and spent zero dollars on marketing. The process to raise that seed round introduced 14.1 million USD in capital in a round that was co-led by Mouro Capital and QED investors, including participation from counterpart ventures.
"Remofirst enables HR and finance managers to hire talent anywhere in the world and integrate them into their organisation remotely most efficiently and effectively while combining the latest fintech offerings with their global employer of record capabilities," said QED Investors Partner Yusuf Özdalga.
Since their funding seed round, Remofirst, operating in stealth, has grown to 40 employees, and by focusing on growth, the company is no longer cash-flow positive. However, Serik says that the company’s income has risen 11 times yearly. Remoirst operates in an increasingly crowded space, including the likes of Deel and Atlas, in which both companies have raised hundreds of millions in capital. Deel began with a focus on contractors and was most recently valued at 12 billion USD. Atlas raised 200 million USD last week in its latest funding round. Remote is another large player in the space that recently laid off 100 workers after being valued at three billion USD. However, Remofirst is not discouraged by its larger competition, including legacy providers and novel startups.
"Incumbent providers are not very tech-savvy and are super expensive," Serik said. "And when we started, some of our competitors had raised a bunch of money. So it was quite tough for us because these very well-funded companies were operating in space. To differentiate itself, Remofirst spoke with potential customers and heard that cost was a barrier—that there were "good solutions out there, but they were cost prohibitive."
With this in mind, the company started the idea of guaranteeing to make the service more affordable. They planned to make sure that their solution was a viable business and that the unit economies were healthy, while simultaneously offering pricing that was more optimal than anyone else in the market. Serik claims that this will lower the cost of its service.
As Serik said, going global is a daunting experience and having strong contact from day one is very important. Therefore, Remofirst aims to offer dedicated account managers to all its customers. Manuel Silva Martnez, the general partner at Mouro Capital, said, “clarity of RemoFirst’s competitive assessment and speed of execution stood out in a growing, yet crowded, space,” and added that RemoFirst stands out for its ability to apply a digital overlay to real-world problems in an asset-light way.
QED Investors partner Yusuf Özdalga said his firm was attracted to Remofirst after learning how much it had accomplished with "very little" external capital. They have built their product, ramped to more than seven figures in revenue, and achieved breakeven with minimal funding. Very few companies can accomplish this, and the ones that do usually have great product-market fit, great founders, or both. " Moreover, QED welcomes Remofirst’s seed round as they observed that the current propositions in the market left a massive potential for the best provider to come along with a modern tech-enabled product and high-level customer support. The most exciting factor is its cost-efficient price point, which captures a huge market share.”
The early success and profitability helped Remofirst drive significant investor interest and raise the largest seed round in just two months in a highly competitive and well-funded space. The company has recently expanded its leadership team with key industry hires and plans to announce its newest product update to enhance prices even further by the end of the year.
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