Remote hit a big number. $300 million annual recurring revenue.
It also became cash-flow positive. Nice.
But Amsterdam-based startup Remote thinks the real story is boring stats you won’t find in most press releases.
Revenue per employee jumped 50%.
They did this without hiring a single extra person.
Actually they might have hired fewer than planned.
The internal AI kitchen sink
Job van der Voort the CEO doesn’t hide his methods. He has five Claude instances open on a second monitor right now. Building stuff. For himself. Mostly for the company.
“We know that we’re ahead of most companies in that sense” – CEO Job van der Voort
They have Slack bots summarizing meetings. They are testing agentic AI. It’s not just engineers playing around. Every department is launching apps in Remote Labs. An internal marketplace. Basically what they sell customers but used on themselves.
This “eat your own dogfood” strategy feeds directly into Remote Build.
Think of them as forward-deployed engineers.
They sit inside customer companies and build custom workflows using Remote’s tools. If it works for Remote it should work for the thousands of global employers using them to navigate tax and labor laws.
Van der Voort says the core payroll business grew over 300% year-over-year.
He attributes it to AI.
There is no third party verifying that figure. But Remote insists they now serve tens of thousands of companies. Most of those clients have people in actual offices. The name Remote is slightly misleading but the tech is universal.
“We do payroll for everybody. Period.”
Disappearing software interfaces
Most HR software went the all-in-one route.
Remote went narrow. They focus on the hard messy problem of paying people globally while pretending it’s easy.
Now they are opening up even more.
The new Remote MCP lets AI agents talk to Remote directly. Model Context Protocol standard.
It allows platforms like BambooHR or Workday to treat Remote as an engine under the hood.
Van der Voort sees this as validation. Commoditized software dies. Niche complex problems stay.
The end game is wild.
You won’t need the Remote dashboard.
You’ll just ask ChatGPT or Claude. The AI agent talks to Remote’s API. You get your answer.
Remote effectively vanishes.
“I think that’s where the future goes” – van der Voort
His personal AI agent named Jim already does this.
Open source. Secure.
Jim can fetch data. Jim can’t delete everything. It’s a taste of what comes next when AI handles sensitive payroll data without human thumbs touching a keyboard.
Who gets fired? Nobody (yet)
The coding volume at Remote is up 60% since last year.
In the last month? Over 85% of new code is AI written.
Sounds scary for engineers.
Van der Voort says they didn’t lay anyone off.
They just didn’t hire the extra bodies they originally budgeted for.
The math is simple. Why spend millions on heads when you can spend less on API credits and training?
“We have some space to spend that on those initiatives” – van der Voort
He keeps tabs on the cost. AI is getting expensive. But so is human error in international compliance.
The balance seems to tip toward software right now.
A messy future?
This is a cleaner data point than most hype pieces offer.
More revenue per headcount. Less hiring. Faster shipping.
It’s the operating model everyone wants but few pull off.
Remote is automating the tedious bureaucratic soul-suck of payroll.
Van der Voort calls it fun now.
That’s the irony. Payroll was never fun. But if AI makes the spreadsheet less of a chore maybe management enjoys watching the margins grow a little more.
Does your agent do your work?
Probably not yet.
But the infrastructure is there. Waiting.
