Remote, a seven-year-old payroll service provider based in Amsterdam, says it recently surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue and is cash flow positive. But he insists the real story is what’s happening behind the scenes. After implementing AI at all levels of the organization, the startup saw a 50% increase in revenue per employee.
“As we speak, on the second screen of my laptop, I have five different Claude instances running and building different things, some for personal use, many for remote use,” CEO Job van der Voort told TechCrunch. This includes Slack agents summarizing discussions and experimenting with agent AI. But the bigger picture is that Remote is generating more revenue without increasing its headcount.
According to van der Voort, the secret behind these efficiency gains is deploying AI far beyond the CEO’s office and engineering department. Employees from all departments are launching apps in remote labs. Remote Lab is an internal marketplace built on the company’s proprietary technology and has similarities to the AI capabilities the company is currently rolling out to customers.
Similar to what Remote has been doing with its own processes, it now helps clients create custom workflows. “We know we are ahead of most companies in that sense,” van der Voort said. “So we founded Remote Build, which is basically what investors like to call ‘forward deployment engineers,’ which are essentially people who work[directly]with customers and prospects and do similar things within the organization.”
Van der Voort argues that these gains could get even worse. He said Remote’s core payroll business grew more than 300% year-over-year, and attributed that growth primarily to AI implementation, but the company did not provide independent verification of that number. Remote also says it currently serves tens of thousands of companies driving global employment compliance, but this number, like ARR Milestone, is driven by the company itself.
While this complexity is Remote’s bread and butter, its staff found relief in removing some of the repetitive and bureaucratic work required to pay workers in nearly every country. “Obviously we’ve automated a lot of that. That’s what we’re doing,” van der Voort said. “But with the advent of AI, it’s easier than ever and definitely more fun.”
While there’s nothing fun about payroll itself, Van der Voort is also excited about the market opportunity it presents for his company. Despite its name, which may suggest it focuses on a distributed or remote workforce, he argued that the company targets all types of businesses, with the majority of its clients employing employees in an office. “We’re on everyone’s payroll.”
Remote’s competitors went in a very different direction. Many companies have adopted an “all-in-one” HR platform model. But Remote sees the current wave of AI and the subsequent commoditization of software as vindication of its decision to stay focused on hard problems.
This also means that Remote has partners and is ready to help them leverage AI. The recently announced Remote MCP is an interface based on the Model Context Protocol, a standard that allows AI agents to securely interact with external software, giving AI agents and external platforms direct access to payroll and compliance data, and 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 effectively wipe out many companies, in a good way. “So with ChatGPT or Claude, you can control everything in Remote, and 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 lies.”
According to van der Voort, the next step is to enable AI agents to interact directly with Remote, with all the security standards required for organizations that handle sensitive financial and personal information, such as 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’ve built it in a secure way so he doesn’t have to worry about the agent doing anything weird and messing things up. He can access what he needs, but he can’t do anything destructive. These are the kinds of things we’re really excited about, and it gives you a little taste of the future.”
What’s happening inside Remote may be a taste of another future. Like other tech companies like Spotify, the company has embraced AI-powered coding, and the amount of contributions from engineers has increased by more than 60% over last year. “And that trend is accelerating because if you look at the last month, over 85% of all code has been written by AI.”
Van der Voort said this has reduced Remote’s hiring plans, but has not resulted in any layoffs. He also pointed out that the company had not planned a large-scale recruitment campaign from the beginning. “But certainly in some departments, our plan was to hire more people than we actually did. (…) What we’re doing very aggressively now is saying, ‘Do we actually need more people, or do we want to spend more time upskilling the people who need to use the AI tools and spend more money directly on AI?'”
His role is to “make sure the company doesn’t run out of cash and can grow as quickly as possible,” but rising AI costs aren’t a concern for him. “Our spending on AI is increasing, but we’re happy because we’re always on top of that spending. And because we’re more efficient as a company, we have some room to spend on AI and those initiatives.”
Remote’s trajectory provides one of the cleanest data points to date in the broader discussion of AI’s real-world business impact. The company isn’t just using AI to get faster, it’s also using it to reimagine how it scales. Increasing revenue per employee, deferring hiring, and expanding product offerings without proportionately increasing headcount are operating models that many companies are pursuing.
Another reason Van der Voort is happy with AI is that it has improved his own role. “I think this adds a whole new and fun angle.”
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