Payroll startup Remote says it grew revenue 50% per employee without adding headcount

Remote , a seven-year-old, Amsterdam-based payroll service provider, says it recently surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue and became cash-flow positive. But the real story, it insists, is what happened behind the scenes: a 50% increase in revenue per employee after the startup adopted AI at every level of the organization. “As we are talking, on the second screen of my laptop, I have five different Claude instances running, building different things — and some of those are for me, but a lot of them 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 AI adoption well beyond the CEO’s office or engineering department. Employees across all functions have been launching apps in Remote Labs, an internal marketplace built on the company’s own technology, and which shares similarities with the AI capabilities that the company is now opening up for its clients. Similarly to what Remote has been doing for its own processes, it is now helping clients create custom workflows. “We know that we’re ahead of most companies in that sense,” says van der Voort. …