Organizations throughout the world are adjusting as remote work grows more common, particularly in terms of new hire onboarding processes and handling cross-border payment challenges. The need for startups that offer payroll, compliance, and human resources (HR) tools to assist businesses in hiring remote workers has increased as a result of this new era of work.
One such UAE-based company, RemotePass, has secured $5.5 million in Series A funding led by 212 VC, located in Istanbul. Endeavor Catalyst, Khwarizmi Ventures, Oraseya Capital, Flyer One Ventures, Access Bridge Ventures, A15, and the Swiss Founders Fund are among the other investors who have participated.
In order to enable companies to hire, manage, and compensate their workforce in nations where they do not have a local legal presence, CEO Kamal Reggad and Karim Nadi founded RemotePass in late 2020. Employing contractors and full-time staff in more than 150 countries is made easier by the platform, which caters to a variety of clients including startups and major corporations like Spotify and Logitech.
However, this idea was not the foundation of RemotePass. It was SafarPass a year prior to launch, providing a SaaS platform via a dedicated app for business travel and expense management. It was intended to address the general chaos of business travel, which had attracted a lot of attention up until the pandemic struck.
Reggad stated in a media interview that SafarPass’s problems made it more obvious that the pandemic would delay the recovery of business travel. A change in the market made a turnabout inevitable. Prior to the pandemic, SafarPass employed eighteen people remotely from the United Arab Emirates, Africa, and Europe. Reggad thus gained firsthand knowledge of the complexities involved in overseeing a remote workforce and overcoming related payment obstacles, which laid the foundation for RemotePass.
With this additional funding, RemotePass has two goals in mind. First, it’s stepping up efforts to improve the enterprise readiness of its product. Second, it plans to intensify product localization while onboarding more companies in Saudi Arabia, the country where it has experienced the greatest growth.
