Oyster, a human resource platform, closed a $20 million Series A to help companies hire in more than 100 different countries, Crunchbase has reported.
The round was led by Emergence Capital, and comes less than a year after the company raised a $4.2 million seed round.
Oyster’s platform helps companies deal with complex employment rules and regulations when hiring full-time employees and contractors in different countries, as well as manage a distributed diverse workforce, said founder and CEO Tony Jamous.
“We are a software platform that makes it easy to employ people anywhere,” Jamous said.
Despite founding the company the year before a pandemic, Oyster’s work-from-anywhere platform has been adopted by hundreds of companies, Jamous said. With so many working from home, he said, it was easy to prove a product/market fit in only a few months.
“This became a problem for everybody overnight,” Jamous added.
While Oyster’s platform helps with hiring abroad, it also has features that help companies manage and train their employees to work remotely, he added.
Despite having competition in the market from legacy companies such as Globalization Partners, as well as startups like San Francisco-based Remote and Deel, Jamous expects the company to continue to grow with its new funding. The 30-person company, which is U.S. – based but has no headquarters to help promote its remote focus, expects employee count to be at 80 by the end of the year, he said.
While he is excited about the company’s growth in 2020, Jamous said the company also is mission driven to remove borders and allow access to job opportunities for all.
Founder of Emergence, Jason Green, said he likely found Oyster as an investment opportunity due to remote working. Emergence was an early investor and adopter of Zoom, and working remotely made it possible to learn about Oyster and Jamous.
Green said he sees Jamous building something that can be both “independent and important.”
“Oyster just removes all friction” from the hiring process, Green said. “There are very few companies that solve this problem.”
