Payroll startup Remote says it grew revenue 50% per employee without adding headcount

Remote, a seven-year-old, Amsterdam-based payroll service provider, says it recently surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue and became cash-flow positive. But the real story, it insists, is what happened behind the scenes: a 50% increase in revenue per employee after the startup adopted AI at every level of the organization.

“As we are talking, on the second screen of my laptop, I have five different Claude instances running, building different things — and some of those are for me, but a lot of them are for Remote,” CEO Job van der Voort tells TechCrunch. This includes a Slack agent that summarizes discussions, as well as experiments with agentic AI; but the bigger picture is that Remote is now generating more revenue without increasing its headcount.

According to van der Voort, the recipe behind these efficiency gains is AI adoption well beyond the CEO’s office or engineering department. Employees across all functions have been launching apps in Remote Labs, an internal marketplace built on the company’s own technology, and which shares similarities with the AI capabilities that the company is now opening up for its clients.

Similarly to what Remote has been doing for its own processes, it is now helping clients create custom workflows. “We know that we’re ahead of most companies in that sense,” says van der Voort. “So we set up Remote Build, which is essentially what investors like to call ‘forward-deployed engineers’ — essentially people who work [directly] with our customers and prospects to do similar things inside of their organizations.” 

Van der Voort claims these gains could compound further. He says Remote’s core payroll business has grown more than 300% year over year — growth he attributes largely to AI adoption, though the company has not provided independent verification of that figure. Remote also says it now serves tens of thousands of companies navigating global employment compliance, a number that, like its ARR milestone, comes from the company itself.

While Remote’s bread and butter is precisely this complexity, its staff also found relief in removing some of the repetitive and bureaucratic work required to pay workers in almost every country. “Obviously we’ve been automating a lot of that; that’s what we do,” says van der Voort. “But with AI that became easier, and arguably more fun than ever before.”

Even though there’s nothing fun about payroll per se, van der Voort is also excited about the market opportunity it represents for his company. Despite its name — which might suggest a focus on distributed or remote workforces — he insisted the company targets all types of businesses, and the vast majority of its clients employ people in offices. “We do payroll for everybody, period.”

Remote’s competitors largely went a different direction. Many went on to adopt an “all-in-one” HR platform model. But Remote sees the current AI wave and the subsequent commoditization of software as validation for its decision to stay focused on a hard problem.

This also means that Remote has partners, and it is prepared to get out of the way to let them leverage AI. The recently launched Remote MCP, an interface based on the Model Context Protocol (a standard that lets AI agents securely interact with external software), grants AI agents and external platforms direct access to payroll and compliance data, allowing platforms like BambooHR and Workday to use Remote as an underlying engine. 

This goes hand in hand with the rise of agentic AI, which could see many companies virtually disappear — in a good way. “So if you use ChatGPT or Claude, you can control all of Remote; if you really wanted to, you don’t have to interact with our platform anymore,” van der Voort says. “I think that’s where the future goes.”

According to van der Voort, the next step will be for AI agents to interact directly with Remote — with all the security standards required for an organization that deals with sensitive financial and personal information like payroll data. His own OpenClaw assistant — an open source personal AI agent he named Jim — has served as an early explorer. “Jim can interact with Remote, and we build it in such a way that it is secure, so I don’t have to worry about my agent doing crazy stuff and messing things up. He has access to what he needs, but he cannot do destructive things. Those are the kinds of things that we’re really excited about, and it gives you a little bit of a taste of the future.”

What’s happening internally at Remote may be another taste of the future. Like other tech companies, such as Spotify, it has embraced AI-powered coding, and the volume of contributions from its engineers has risen more than 60% over the last year. “And that’s accelerating, because if you look over the last month, more than 85% of all of our code is written by AI.” 

This has reduced Remote’s hiring plans, but hasn’t caused any job cuts, van der Voort says. He also noted that the company had not been planning a big recruitment campaign to begin with. “But certainly in some departments our plans were to hire more people than we did. [… ] What we’re doing now very actively is evaluating: ‘Do we actually need more people, or do we want to spend more time on upskilling the people that we have to use AI tools, and directly spending more money on AI?’.”

His role is to “make sure that the company doesn’t run out of money and grows as fast as possible,” but rising AI costs aren’t a concern for him. “Our spend on AI is increasing, but we keep track of it, so it’s something that we’re happy with; and because we become more efficient as a company, we have some space to spend that on AI and those initiatives.”

Remote’s trajectory offers one of the cleaner data points yet in the broader conversation about AI’s real business impact. The company isn’t just using AI to move faster — it’s using it to restructure how it scales. More revenue per employee, deferred hiring, and an expanding product surface area without proportional headcount growth is the operating model many companies are chasing.

Another reason why van der Voort is happy with AI is that it has improved his own role. “This adds a whole new fun angle, I would say.”

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