Remote Payroll says it has achieved a 50% increase in revenue per employee without adding headcount

Remote, a seven-year-old Amsterdam-based payroll services provider, says it recently surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue and became cash flow positive. But she insists the real story is what happened behind the scenes: a 50% increase in revenue per employee after the startup embraced AI at every level of the organization.

“As we speak, on the second screen of my laptop, I have five different instances of Claude running, building different things — some of which are for me, but a lot of which are for Remote,” CEO Job van der Voort tells TechCrunch. This includes a Slack agent that summarizes discussions, as well as experiments with agentic AI; But the bigger picture is that Remote is now generating more revenue without increasing its headcount.

According to van der Voort, the recipe behind these efficiency gains is adopting AI beyond the CEO’s office or engineering department. Employees across all functions have launched apps in Remote Labs, an internal marketplace built on the company’s technology, which is similar to the AI ​​capabilities the company is now opening up to its customers.

Similar to what Remote was doing for its own operations, it now helps customers create custom workflows. “We know we are ahead of most companies in this sense,” says van der Voort. “So we created Remote Build, which is basically what investors like to call ‘forward deployed engineers’ — basically the people who work [directly] With our clients and prospects to do similar things within their organizations.

Van der Voort claims that these gains could be further exacerbated. He says Remote’s core payroll business grew more than 300% year-over-year, a growth he attributes largely to the adoption of AI, though the company did not provide independent verification of that number. Remote also says it now serves tens of thousands of companies navigating global employment compliance, a number that, like the ARR milestone, comes from the company itself.

While Remote’s needs are precisely that complex, its employees have also found relief in removing some of the repetitive work and bureaucracy required to pay workers in almost every country. “Obviously we’ve automated a lot of that; that’s what we’re doing,” says van der Voort. “But with artificial intelligence it is easier, and perhaps more fun, than ever before.”

Although there’s nothing fun about payroll per se, van der Voort is also excited about the market opportunity it represents for his company. Despite its name — which might suggest a focus on distributed or remote workforces — he insisted that the company targets all types of businesses, and that the vast majority of its clients employ people in offices. “We’re paying everyone’s salaries, period.”

Remote’s competitors have largely gone in a different direction. Many have gone on to adopt the “all-in-one” HR platform model. But Remote sees the current AI wave and the subsequent commoditization of software as a validation of its decision to stay focused on a difficult problem.

It also means that Remote has partners, and is willing to go out of the way to let them benefit from AI. The recently launched Remote MCP, an interface based on the Model Context Protocol — a standard that allows AI agents to securely interact with external software — gives AI agents and external platforms direct access to payroll and compliance data, allowing platforms like BambooHR and Workday to use Remote as their core engine.

This goes hand-in-hand with the rise of agentic AI, which could see many businesses virtually disappear – in a good way. “If you use ChatGPT or Claude, you can do all the control remotely; if you really want to, you don’t have to interact with our platform anymore,” says van der Voort. “I think this is where the future is going.”

According to van der Voort, the next step will be for AI agents to interact directly with Remote – with all the security standards required for an organization that handles sensitive financial and personal information such as payroll data. His OpenClaw assistant—an open-source personal AI agent he called Jim—served as an early explorer. “Jim can interact with Remote, and we’re building it in a way that makes it safe, so I don’t have to worry about my agent doing crazy things and screwing things up. He has access to what he needs, but he can’t do destructive things. These are the kinds of things we’re really excited about, and it gives you a little glimpse into the future.”

What’s happening internally at Remote may be another taste of the future. Like other technology companies, Spotify has embraced AI-powered programming, and contributions from its engineers have increased by more than 60% over the past year. “And that’s accelerating, because if you look at the last month, more than 85% of all our code was written by AI.”

Van der Voort says this reduced Remote’s hiring plans, but did not cause any job cuts. He also noted that the company was not planning a major hiring drive initially. “But certainly in some departments our plans were to hire more people than we did. [… ] What we’re doing very actively now is evaluating: “Do we really need more people, or do we want to spend more time upskilling the people we have to use AI tools, and spend more money directly on AI?”

His role is “to make sure the company doesn’t run out of money and grow as fast as possible,” but rising AI costs are not a concern for him. “Our spending on AI is increasing, but we’re tracking it, so it’s something we’re happy about; and as we’ve become more efficient as a company, we have some room to spend that on AI and those initiatives.”

The Remote Track provides one of the cleanest data points yet in the broader conversation about the real business impact of AI. The company is not only using AI to move faster, but it is also using it to restructure how it scales. Increasing revenue per employee, deferring hiring, and expanding product surface area without commensurate headcount growth is the operating model that many companies strive for.

Another reason van der Voort is happy with the AI ​​is that it has improved his role. “I would say this adds a whole new fun angle.”