Leveling the Playing Field: Our Investment in Oyster

For all of human history, our birthplace has played an instrumental role in determining our future employment opportunities. While amazing talent exists all over the world, a disproportionate number of jobs have come with the prerequisite of residence in a major population center. As a result, candidates outside of large cities have access to fewer opportunities and companies in all locations recruit from limited and less diverse talent pools. Remote work and global hiring offer enormous advantages to employers and employees alike, and we believe that a world with more remote-friendly companies will be a more prosperous one, with more equally distributed opportunity.

The transition to remote work is one of the most fundamental macro trends in business today and COVID-19 accelerated that transition by ten years. But companies still struggle to optimize their talent pool by hiring globally due to difficult processes and high costs associated with finding the right candidates, managing international payroll and benefits, and maintaining employment compliance with international employment regulations. Meanwhile, candidates who are interested in working remotely for an international employer struggle to find such opportunities and signal their qualifications to be a successful remote employee.

Oyster’s Solution:

Oyster abstracts the complexity of international employment with a powerful software platform that manages the process end-to-end simply and cost-effectively. It empowers companies to seamlessly hire and onboard employees in over 90 countries while avoiding the time-consuming processes of email chains and phone calls. Oyster continues to rapidly broaden the platform, and now offers benefits packages, contractor management, and a transparent price calculator that helps employers understand the costs and regulations of employment in various countries.

For candidates in search of remote work opportunities, Oyster provides a remote-readiness certification program which includes best-practices training on digital tools, asynchronous communication, and project management. Oyster also offers remote coaching and career guidance as well as connections with fast-growing startups to ensure that employers and employees can find ideal matches.

Stripes Leads Oyster’s $50M Series B:

As we have built a relationship with Oyster’s Founder and CEO Tony Jamous, we have been amazed by his vision of a product-driven global HR platform and his commitment to building a mission-driven organization to promote a more diverse and prosperous workforce of the future. Given he had built and sold the communications platform Nexmo, we knew we were backing a business-builder and Oyster’s rapid execution to scale in just over a year of operations made that even more clear. As we dug in, HR leaders were eager to share their amazing experiences with Oyster relieving a significant and growing pain point in managing their global workforce.

We are honored to welcome Oyster to the Stripes family and look forward to working alongside the team as they continue building a market defining platform for global HR.