According to Fortune, HR platform Oyster has hit a $1 billion valuation after closing a $150 million Series C round led by Georgian. The funding comes less than a year after its $50 million Series B, which valued the company at $475 million, and just two years since its January 2020 launch. The company, founded by ex-Nexmo CEO Tony Jamous, helps businesses hire, onboard, and pay knowledge workers in over 180 countries. Internally, Oyster has grown from 17 employees in 2020 to 500 across 70+ countries, with women making up 60% of its staff. Nearly 1,000 small and medium businesses are now customers, including Quora and Lokalise.
The Infrastructure Play Is Winning
Here’s the thing: Oyster’s rocket-ship valuation isn’t just about remote work being popular. It’s about remote work being operationally hard. Jamous founded the company because he struggled to hire globally himself—the payroll, compliance, and legal barriers are a nightmare. Oyster isn’t selling Zoom licenses or chat apps; it’s selling the plumbing. It’s the boring, crucial backend that makes a borderless workforce actually function. And investors are throwing mountains of cash at that thesis because they see it as a fundamental layer for the future of all companies, not just tech startups. This is a bet on globalization of talent becoming the default, not the exception.
A Very Crowded Race
But let’s be real, they’re not alone. The space for global HR and Employer of Record (EOR) services is fiercely competitive. You’ve got giants like Deel, which is also a unicorn, and well-funded players like Remote, Rippling, and Papaya Global. So what’s Oyster’s angle? They’re leaning hard into the social impact and B-Corp certification, framing their mission as “job accessibility” for talent in emerging economies. It’s a smart differentiator in a market where the core product—payroll and compliance—can start to look commoditized. Basically, they’re selling the dream of a more equitable global economy alongside the software. Will that resonate more with customers than pure features or price? That’s the billion-dollar question.
The CEO’s Activist Vision
Jamous calls himself a “remote-work activist,” and his personal story fuels the company’s culture. He doesn’t work mornings, logs on at night, and talks about designing a life. That philosophy is baked in—Oyster doesn’t expect real-time responses. It’s a radical experiment in asynchronous work at scale. And look, it’s a powerful narrative, especially when he cites research about a $10 trillion GDP loss from global talent imbalances. But running a 500-person, fully async, globally distributed company is insanely complex. The valuation brings immense pressure to grow even faster, and that kind of growth can strain any culture, especially one built on idealism. Can they scale the soul of the startup with the headcount?
Is This The New Normal?
The staggering growth from 17 to 500 employees in two years is a microcosm of the trend they’re selling. It proves their own model works, which is their best marketing. The bet investors are making is that the pandemic didn’t just accelerate a trend—it flipped a switch. The demand for this infrastructure isn’t going away even if some companies mandate returns to the office. A whole segment of the economy has permanently decoupled job location from talent. Oyster and its competitors are building the rails for that new reality. So while the valuation seems huge for a two-year-old company, it’s a direct reflection of the sheer size of the global workforce puzzle they’re trying to solve. The companies that get this infrastructure right aren’t just selling software; they’re enabling a fundamental reorganization of how the world works.
