Remote, a seven-year-old payroll company based in Amsterdam, has announced it surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue and became cash-flow positive. But the real headline, according to the company, is a 50% increase in revenue per employee after it embraced AI across every department.
CEO Job van der Voort tells TechCrunch that his laptop currently hosts five Claude instances building various things - some for himself, many for Remote. These include a Slack agent that summarizes discussions and experiments with agentic AI. The broader result: Remote generates more money without adding headcount.
The secret sauce, van der Voort explains, is AI adoption beyond the C-suite or engineering. Employees across all functions have been launching apps in Remote Labs, an internal marketplace built on the company's own technology - similar to what Remote now offers clients. The company is helping customers create custom workflows through Remote Build, which van der Voort describes as "forward-deployed engineers" who work directly with clients to replicate these efficiencies.
Van der Voort claims Remote's core payroll business has grown more than 300% year over year, largely thanks to AI - though the company hasn't provided independent verification. Remote says it now serves tens of thousands of companies navigating global employment compliance, a figure that, like its ARR milestone, comes from the company itself.
The company's staff found relief in automating repetitive, 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."
Despite its name, Remote targets all types of businesses - van der Voort insists the vast majority of its clients employ people in offices. "We do payroll for everybody, period."
Remote's competitors largely adopted an "all-in-one" HR platform model, but Remote sees the current AI wave as validation for its focus on a hard problem. The company recently launched Remote MCP, an interface based on the Model Context Protocol, that grants AI agents and external platforms like BambooHR and Workday direct access to payroll and compliance data.
"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."
Internally, Remote has embraced AI-powered coding, with engineer contributions rising 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.
His own OpenClaw assistant - an open-source personal AI agent 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."
Remote's trajectory offers one of the cleaner data points yet in the broader conversation about AI's real business impact. More revenue per employee, deferred hiring, and an expanding product surface area without proportional headcount growth is the operating model many companies are chasing. Van der Voort sums it up: "This adds a whole new fun angle."