Payroll startup Remote says it grew revenue 50% per employee without adding headcount
Payroll startup Remote says it grew revenue 50% per employee without adding headcount
薪资管理初创公司 Remote 宣布：在不增加员工人数的情况下，人均营收增长 50%
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. 总部位于阿姆斯特丹的薪资服务提供商 Remote 成立已有七年。该公司近日宣布，其年度经常性收入（ARR）已突破 3 亿美元，并实现了现金流转正。但该公司强调，真正的亮点在于幕后的变化：在全公司各层级引入人工智能后，其人均营收增长了 50%。
“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. “就在我们交谈时，我笔记本电脑的第二个屏幕上正运行着五个不同的 Claude 实例，它们在构建各种东西——有些是为我个人服务的，但更多是为 Remote 工作的，”首席执行官 Job van der Voort 在接受 TechCrunch 采访时表示。这包括一个用于总结讨论的 Slack 智能体，以及对智能体 AI（agentic AI）的实验；但更宏观的意义在于，Remote 现在无需增加员工人数即可创造更多收入。
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. 据 van der Voort 称，实现这些效率提升的秘诀在于 AI 的应用范围远不止于 CEO 办公室或工程部门。各职能部门的员工都在“Remote Labs”中发布应用程序，这是一个基于公司自身技术构建的内部市场，其功能与公司目前向客户开放的 AI 能力有相似之处。
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. “So we set up Remote Build, which is essentially what investors like to call ‘forward-deployed engineers’ — essentially people who work [directly] with our customers and prospects to do similar things inside of their organizations.” 正如 Remote 在自身流程中所做的那样，它现在也正在帮助客户创建自定义工作流。“我们知道在这方面我们领先于大多数公司，”van der Voort 说。“因此我们成立了 Remote Build，这本质上就是投资者所说的‘前线部署工程师’——他们直接与我们的客户和潜在客户合作，在他们的组织内部实现类似的操作。”
Van der Voort claims these gains could compound further. He says Remote’s core payroll business has grown more than 300% year over year — growth he attributes largely to AI adoption, though the company has not provided independent verification of that figure. Remote also says it now serves tens of thousands of companies navigating global employment compliance, a number that, like its ARR milestone, comes from the company itself. Van der Voort 声称这些收益可能会进一步叠加。他表示，Remote 的核心薪资业务同比增长超过 300%——他将这种增长主要归功于 AI 的采用，尽管该公司尚未提供该数据的独立核实。Remote 还表示，目前已为数万家处理全球就业合规问题的公司提供服务，这一数字与其 ARR 里程碑一样，均来自公司内部统计。
While Remote’s bread and butter is precisely this complexity, its staff also found relief in removing some of the repetitive and bureaucratic work required to pay workers in almost every country. “Obviously we’ve been automating a lot of that; that’s what we do,” says van der Voort. “But with AI that became easier, and arguably more fun than ever before.” 虽然 Remote 的核心业务正是处理这种复杂性，但其员工也通过消除在几乎每个国家支付工资时所需的重复性和官僚主义工作而感到轻松。“显然，我们一直在自动化处理其中的大部分工作；这就是我们的本职，”van der Voort 说。“但有了 AI，这一切变得更容易，甚至可以说比以往任何时候都更有趣。”
Even though 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 the company targets all types of businesses, and the vast majority of its clients employ people in offices. “We do payroll for everybody, period.” 尽管薪资管理本身谈不上什么乐趣，但 van der Voort 对其为公司带来的市场机遇感到兴奋。尽管公司名称可能让人联想到其专注于分布式或远程办公群体，但他坚持认为公司面向所有类型的企业，且绝大多数客户雇佣的是办公室员工。“我们为所有人提供薪资服务，仅此而已。”
Remote’s competitors largely went a different direction. Many went on to adopt an “all-in-one” HR platform model. But Remote sees the current AI wave and the subsequent commoditization of software as validation for its decision to stay focused on a hard problem. This also means that Remote has partners, and it is prepared to get out of the way to let them leverage AI. Remote 的竞争对手大多选择了不同的方向。许多公司采用了“一体化”人力资源平台模式。但 Remote 将当前的 AI 浪潮及随之而来的软件商品化视为其坚持攻克难题这一决策的验证。这也意味着 Remote 拥有合作伙伴，并准备好退居幕后，让合作伙伴利用 AI。
The recently launched Remote MCP — an interface based on the Model Context Protocol — a standard that lets AI agents securely interact with external software — grants AI agents and external platforms direct access to payroll and compliance data, allowing platforms like BambooHR and Workday to use Remote as an underlying engine. This goes hand in hand with the rise of agentic AI, which could see many companies virtually disappear — in a good way. 最近推出的 Remote MCP（基于模型上下文协议的接口，该标准允许 AI 智能体与外部软件安全交互）授予了 AI 智能体和外部平台直接访问薪资和合规数据的权限，使 BambooHR 和 Workday 等平台能够将 Remote 作为底层引擎。这与智能体 AI 的兴起相辅相成，可能会让许多公司在“虚拟层面”上消失——这是一种积极的转变。
“So if you use ChatGPT or Claude, you can control all of Remote; if you really wanted to, you don’t have to interact with our platform anymore,” van der Voort says. “I think that’s where the future goes.” “所以，如果你使用 ChatGPT 或 Claude，你就可以控制整个 Remote；如果你真的想的话，你甚至不需要再与我们的平台直接交互，”van der Voort 说。“我认为这就是未来的方向。”
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 deals with sensitive financial and personal information like payroll data. His own OpenClaw assistant — an open-source personal AI agent he named Jim — has served as an early explorer. 据 van der Voort 称，下一步将是让 AI 智能体直接与 Remote 交互——同时满足处理薪资数据等敏感财务和个人信息的组织所需的所有安全标准。他自己的 OpenClaw 助手——一个他命名为 Jim 的开源个人 AI 智能体——已经成为了早期的探索者。
“Jim can interact with Remote, and we build it in such a way that it is secure, so I don’t have to worry about my agent doing crazy stuff and messing things up. He has access to what he needs, but he cannot do destructive things. Those are the kinds of things that we’re really excited about, and it gives you a little bit of a taste of the future.” “Jim 可以与 Remote 交互，我们以一种安全的方式构建了它，所以我不用担心我的智能体做出疯狂的事情或搞砸一切。它有权访问它需要的东西，但不能做破坏性的事情。这些正是我们感到非常兴奋的地方，它让你提前尝到了未来的滋味。”
What’s happening internally at Remote may be another taste of the future. Like other tech companies, such as Spotify, it has embraced AI-powered coding, and the volume of contributions from its engineers has risen more than 60% over the last year. “And that’s accelerating, because if you look over the last month, more than 85% of all of our code is written by AI.” Remote 内部正在发生的事情可能是未来的另一个缩影。像 Spotify 等其他科技公司一样，它已经拥抱了 AI 辅助编程，其工程师的贡献量在过去一年中增长了超过 60%。“而且这种趋势正在加速，因为如果你看过去一个月的数据，我们超过 85% 的代码都是由 AI 编写的。”
This has reduced Remote’s hiring plans, but hasn’t caused any job cuts, van der Voort says. He also noted that the company had not been planning a big recruitment campaign to begin with. “But certainly in some departments our plans were to hire more people than we did. […] What we’re doing now very actively is evaluating: ‘Do we actually need more people, or do we want to spend more time on upskilling the people that we have to use AI tools, and directly spending more money on AI?’.” van der Voort 表示，这减少了 Remote 的招聘计划，但并未导致任何裁员。他还指出，公司最初并没有计划进行大规模的招聘活动。“但肯定在某些部门，我们原本计划招聘的人数比实际要多。[……] 我们现在非常积极地进行评估：‘我们真的需要更多人吗？还是我们想花更多时间提升现有员工使用 AI 工具的能力，并直接在 AI 上投入更多资金？’”
His role is to “make sure that the company doesn’t run out of money and grows as fast as possible,” but rising AI costs aren’t a concern for him. “Our spend on AI is increasing, but we keep track of it, so it’s something that we’re happy with; and because we become more efficient as a company, we have some space to spend that on AI and those initiatives.” 他的职责是“确保公司不会耗尽资金并尽可能快地增长”，但 AI 成本的上升对他来说并不是问题。“我们在 AI 上的支出确实在增加，但我们一直在跟踪，所以我们对此感到满意；而且由于我们公司的效率提高了，我们有空间将资金投入到 AI 和这些计划中。”
Remote’s trajectory offers one of the cleaner data points yet in the broader conversation about AI’s real business impact. The company isn’t just using AI to move faster — it’s using it to restructure how it scales. More revenue per employee, deferred hiring, and an expanding product surface area. Remote 的发展轨迹为关于 AI 实际商业影响的广泛讨论提供了一个非常清晰的数据点。该公司不仅利用 AI 来提高速度，还在利用它重构其规模化扩张的方式。更高的人均营收、推迟的招聘计划以及不断扩大的产品覆盖面。