Remote an Amsterdam-based payroll services provider, founded seven years ago, says it recently exceeded $300 million in annual recurring revenue and became cash flow positive. But the real story, he insists, is what happened behind the scenes: a 50% increase in revenue per employee after the startup adopted AI at all levels of the organization.
“As we speak, on the second screen of my laptop, I have five different Claude instances running, building different things, and some of them 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 agent AI; but the big 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 the adoption of AI far beyond the CEO’s office or the engineering department. Employees across functions have been launching apps in Remote Labs, an internal marketplace built with the company’s own technology and that shares similarities with the AI capabilities the company is now opening up to its customers.
Similar to what Remote has been doing with its own processes, it now helps customers create custom workflows. “We know that we are ahead of most companies in that regard,” says van der Voort. “So we created Remote Build, which is essentially what investors like to call ‘advanced engineers’: essentially people who work (directly) with our customers and prospects to do similar things within their organizations.”
Van der Voort says these developments could become even worse. He says Remote’s core payroll business has grown more than 300% year over year; growth it attributes largely to the adoption of AI, although the company has not provided independent verification of that figure. Remote also says it now serves tens of thousands of companies navigating global labor 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 eliminating some of the repetitive and bureaucratic work needed to pay workers in almost every country. “We’ve obviously been automating a lot of that; that’s what we do,” van der Voort says. “But with AI that became easier and possibly more fun than ever.”
While there’s nothing fun about payroll itself, 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 that the company targets all types of businesses and that the vast majority of its clients employ people in offices. “We make payroll for everyone, period.”
Remote’s competitors largely went in a different direction. Many adopted an “all-in-one” HR platform model. But Remote sees the current wave of AI and the subsequent commoditization of software as validation of its decision to stay focused on a difficult problem.
This also means that Remote has partners and is willing to get out of the way to allow them to take advantage of AI. The recently released remote MCP An interface based on the Model Context Protocol, a standard that allows AI agents to securely interact with external software, gives AI agents and external platforms direct access to payroll and compliance data, allowing platforms like BambooHR and Workday to use Remote as the underlying engine.
This goes hand in hand with the rise of agent AI, which could make many companies practically disappear, in a good way. “So if you use ChatGPT or Claude, you can control everything Remote; if you really want to, you don’t have to interact with our platform anymore,” says van der Voort. “I think that’s where the future is going.”
According to van der Voort, the next step will be for AI agents to interact directly with Remote, with all the security standards necessary for an organization that handles sensitive financial and personal information, such as payroll data. His own assistant OpenClaw, an open source AI personal agent he named Jim, has been an early explorer. “Jim can interact with Remote and we built it in a way that it’s safe, so I don’t have to worry about my agent doing crazy things and ruining things. He has access to what he needs, but he can’t do destructive things. That’s the kind of stuff that really excites us and gives you a little glimpse of the future.”
What’s happening internally at Remote may be another taste of the future. Like other technology companies, like Spotifyhas embraced AI-powered coding and the volume of contributions from its engineers has increased more than 60% over the past year. “And that’s accelerating, because if you look at the last month, more than 85% of all our code is written by AI.”
This has reduced Remote’s hiring plans, but has not led to any job cuts, van der Voort says. He also noted that the company hadn’t planned a big hiring drive to begin with. “But certainly in some departments our plans were to hire more people than we hired. (…) What we are doing very actively now is evaluating: ‘Do we really need more people, or do we want to spend more time training the people we have to use AI tools, and directly spend more money on AI?'”
His role is to “make sure the company doesn’t run out of money and grows as quickly as possible,” but rising AI costs aren’t a concern for him. “Our spending on AI is increasing, but we track it, so it’s something we’re happy with; and as we become more efficient as a company, we have some room to spend on AI and those initiatives.”
Remote’s journey offers one of the clearest data points yet in the broader conversation about the real impact of AI on business. The company is not only using AI to move faster, it is using it to restructure its scale. More revenue per employee, deferred hiring, and expanding product footprint without commensurate workforce growth is the operating model many companies pursue.
Another reason van der Voort is happy with AI is that it has enhanced his own role. “This adds a whole new angle of fun, I would say.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
