OYSTER HR

Tony Jamous had previously built Nexmo (a communications API company sold to Vonage for $230 million) with a distributed team. He knew firsthand how painful it was to hire people in other countries — different labor laws, tax codes, benefits systems, contracts.

Every country is its own bureaucratic maze.

When COVID forced every company to go remote in March 2020, Jamous saw the opportunity. Companies suddenly wanted to hire the best person regardless of location, but they had no infrastructure to do it legally.

Oyster launched to be that infrastructure.

Oyster acts as the "Employer of Record" (EOR) for your international hires. Here’s how it works: you find a great engineer in Portugal, but you don’t have a Portuguese office.

Oyster legally employs that person through its local entity in Portugal, handles their payroll, taxes, and benefits, and you manage them day-to-day. You pay Oyster a monthly fee per employee — typically $499-$699/month.

Oyster handles everything from locally compliant contracts to benefits to payroll processing. They make money on the per-employee fee and currency exchange margins.

Employer of Record — hire and pay employees in 180+ countries compliantly. Oyster also offers contractor management, global payroll, and benefits administration.

Their platform handles country-specific contract generation, tax withholding, and statutory benefits.

Their hiring toolkit includes salary insights (what to pay in each market), compliance alerts, and equity compensation management for international employees.

Perfect timing + first-mover in the pandemic remote work boom. Oyster grew from launch to thousands of customers in under two years.

They aggressively expanded country coverage — now in 180+ countries — making them one of the most comprehensive EOR platforms available. Content marketing and partnerships with remote work advocates drove organic growth.

The EOR space got incredibly crowded incredibly fast. Remote.com, Deel, Papaya Global, Velocity Global, and others all raised hundreds of millions to compete.

Differentiation is hard when everyone offers the same core service. The other challenge: if companies start setting up their own entities (which gets easier with automation), the EOR model loses its reason to exist.

Backed by Georgian, Tiger Global, and Emergence Capital. The $222 million in funding came across multiple rounds as Oyster scaled rapidly during the remote work boom.

Georgian led the Series C.