Oyster, a San Francisco-based remote workforce management platform, announced that it has reached over $1B valuations after securing $150M in a Series C funding round led by Georgian. Notably, the company became a unicorn less than two years.
Other investors, including Salesforce Ventures, LinkedIn, the Base10 Partners Advancement Initiative, Okta, and Endeavor Catalyst, joined the round.
Existing investors like Stripes, Emergence Capital, PayPal Ventures, Slack Fund, Avid Ventures, PeopleTech Partners, and HR Tech Investments, an affiliate of Indeed, also participated.
The funding announcement comes months after raising Series A in February and a Series B in June. To date, the company has raised a total of $227M.
How will the funding be used?
The HR tech startup plans to use the funds to develop its global employment platform and invest in the People Ops community.
Additionally, the company aims to create a gold standard distributed culture and deliver on its high-impact social mission.
“Distributed work is better for business, better for people, and better for the planet,” says Oyster Co-founder & CEO Tony Jamous.
He adds, “Our mission, to create a more equal world by helping companies everywhere hire people anywhere, fuels everything that we do. It’s thanks to the strength and impact of that mission that we have been able to grow our team and business in such an unprecedented way. We’re thrilled to work with Georgian and our investor partners on this step of the journey.”
How was Oyster born?
In 2019, Oyster was born with a single question – “How can we make global employment easier for companies and talented workers?”
Today, the flow between talent and opportunity globally is still blocked by the costs and legal complexity companies face before they can fully employ in another country.
Cross-border hiring is still arcane, remarkably un-transformed by software, and ripe for disruption. Here’s where Oyster comes into play and tries to remove these barriers.
Solving Cross-border hiring issues
Founded in 2020 by Tony Jamous and Jack Mardack, Oyster is a global employment platform that empowers companies to hire, pay, and care for their teams.
In 2021, the company grew its revenue by over 20x and the number of team members employed on its platform by 17x. The US company also attracted over 20,000 job applications in Q1 2022.
As per the company’s claims, customers in over 180 countries use its platform and already paid more than $200M to global talent each year, with 25% of that talent living in emerging economies.
In the last two years, Oyster has also created a team of 500 employees.
With employees in over 60 countries, the company has 60% females in its team, one of the highest employee engagement scores in its class.
Investors
“We are excited to support Oyster on their mission to provide opportunities that cross geographic barriers,” says Claudine Emeott, Partner at Salesforce Ventures Impact Fund.
She says, “They’re the kind of company that fits well within our investment mandate for both high growth and high impact. We see Oyster’s mission to incorporate impact as part of their values to be a key differentiator that will only fuel their continued growth.”
“The Oyster team is one of the most mission-aligned companies we’ve ever seen,” said Margaret Wu, Lead Investor at Georgian.
She says, “They’re the kind of company we deeply admire—not just a unicorn, but an ‘impact-unicorn,’ a business that creates enormous value as the direct result of its social impact mission. We’re eager to support them as they lead the world into a new era of work.”
