Payroll startup Remote says it increased revenue by 50% per employee without increasing headcount

They are far away seven-year-old, a payment service provider in Amsterdam, says recently exceeded $300 million annually and became cash-flow positive. But the real story, he insists, is what happened behind the scenes: a 50% increase in the number of employees after the introduction of AI at every level of the organization.

“As we speak, on the second screen of my laptop, I have five Claude events running, building different things – and some of them are mine, but most of them are remote,” CEO Job van der Voort tells TechCrunch. These include a Slack assistant that summarizes conversations, as well as experiments with helpful AI; but the big picture is that Remote is now making more money without increasing its volume.

According to van der Voort, the way to make this happen is to take AI beyond the CEO’s office or the engineering department. Employees at all events have been launching programs in Remote Labs, an internal market built on the company’s technology, which shares similarities with the AI ​​capabilities that the company is opening up to its customers.

Similar to what Remote has been doing on its own, it’s now helping customers create custom workflows. “We know that we are ahead of most companies in this respect,” says van der Voort. “So we launched Remote Build, which is basically what investors like to call ‘front-loaded engineers’ – basically people who work (directly) with our customers and who are expected to do the same within their organizations.”

Van der Voort says these benefits can only grow. He says Remote’s high-paying business has grown more than 300% year-over-year — growth he sees largely as a result of AI adoption, though the company has not provided independent confirmation. Remote also says it now supports thousands of companies that are targeting tracking services around the world, the amount of which, as part of its ARR, comes from the company.

Although the bread and butter of Remote is this difficulty, the employees have also found relief in eliminating some of the repetitive and voluntary tasks that are required to pay employees in almost all countries. “Obviously we’ve been doing a lot; that’s what we do,” says van der Voort. “But with AI it’s become easier, and funnier than ever.”

Although there is nothing exciting about the salary per se, van der Voort is also happy with the market opportunity that represents his company. Despite its name – which can mean a focus on distributed or remote workers – he insisted that the company targets all types of businesses, with many of its clients being office staff. “We pay everyone, period.”

Distant rivals went the other way. Many adopted the “all-in-one” model of HR. But Remote sees the current wave of AI and software sales as vindication of its decision to settle on a bigger problem.

This also means that Remote has partners, and is willing to step out of the way to allow them to use AI. The recently discovered Far MCP an interface based on the Model Context Protocol – a standard that allows AI agents to communicate securely with external applications – gives AI agents and external platforms direct access to payment and tracking data, which allows platforms like BambooHR and Workday to use Remote as a base engine.

This goes hand in hand with the rise of agent AI, which could see many companies disappear – in a good way. “So if you use ChatGPT or Claude, you can control everything remotely; if you really want to, you don’t even have to interact with our platform,” says van der Voort. “I think that’s where the future is going.”

According to van der Voort, the next step will be to collaborate with AI to interact directly with Remote – with all the security standards necessary for an organization that handles complex financial and personal tasks such as payment data. His OpenClaw assistant — an open-source AI assistant he named Jim — served as an ex-investigator. “Jim can interact with the Remote, and we build it in a secure way, so I don’t have to worry about my assistant doing crazy things and messing things up. They can get what they need, but they can’t do anything destructive. That’s something we’re excited about, and it gives you a little taste of the future.”

What’s going on inside Remote may be another taste of the future. Like other technology companies, like Spotifyhas embraced AI-driven writing, and the number of contributions from its engineers has increased by more than 60% in the past year. “And that’s increasing, because if you look at the last month, more than 85% of all our code was written by AI.”

This has reduced Remote’s rental plans, but has not reduced operations, says van der Voort. He added that the company had not planned a major recruitment drive from the start. But of course in some departments our plans were to hire more people than we did.” (… ) What we are doing now very quickly is evaluating: ‘Do we really need more people, or do we want to spend more time on improving the skills of the people we need 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 fast as possible,” but the rising cost of AI doesn’t worry him. “Our spending on AI is increasing, but we’re tracking it, so that’s what we’re excited about; and because we’re being successful as a company, we have room to spend on AI and what we’re doing.”

Remote operations provide one of the cleanest points in the many discussions about AI’s impact on business. The company isn’t just using AI to move faster — it’s using it to innovate as it grows. High costs per employee, slow hiring, and inventory growth without commensurate growth is the operating system most companies are chasing.

Another reason van der Voort is excited about AI is that it has changed its role. “That adds a whole new dimension of fun, I’d say.”