Remote announced an $11 Million Seed round, which is on the larger side for Seed rounds in the HCM space. (This tells you how much money they think they’ll need to raise – it reflects the expectations set for initial investors).
Remote touts an impressive roster of founders from startups outside of the HCM space. They come from companies like Gitlab and Unababel.
Like many startups from outside of the space, with limited domain expertise, the thing that jumps out to me first is a messaging problem, which leads to buyer confusion.
At a high level they are focused on a real trend – the growing distributed workforce. A trend that has been advanced by the current COVID-19 pandemic. Helping companies attract, hire, and retain employees remotely and globally is a meaty business challenge, and one that comes with a dizzying share of compliance and tactical challenges for business and HR leaders. The messaging problem? In just a few clicks on their site, they position themselves as an “onboarding solution,” a ” global PEO” taking over employment of record (they don’t use that term – makes you wonder if they’ve discovered it yet), a job board, and a payroll/HCM offering. All of these things both mean different things to the customer, and all of these things are bought by different roles within the customer. Of course, the value and ROI are different.
HR, payroll, and compliance are more complex than most not having supported it understand. It’s good that they’ve positioned this $11 Million as a Seed round. Our guess is that they burn quite a bit of it getting to understand what their product and value prop really is.
Source: https://blog.remote.com/announcing-our-seed-financing/