Announcing our $150M Series C funding round at a $1 billion+ valuation

It’s a big day for us at Oyster—we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $150 million in Series C funding at a $1 billion-plus valuation!

Georgian, who led the round, was joined by Salesforce Ventures, the Base10 Partners Advancement Initiative, Okta, LinkedIn, and Endeavor Catalyst, along with existing investors Stripes, Emergence Capital, PayPal Ventures, Slack, Avid Ventures, People Tech Partners, and HR Tech Investments, an affiliate of Indeed.

This round of funding establishes Oyster as a unicorn less than two years after our launch and as one of the few B Corporations (certification pending) to achieve the milestone. 

We put together this video to show you just how excited we are about the news:

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This funding round caps off a year of incredible growth for us at Oyster. In 2021, Oyster grew revenue by over 20x and the number of team members employed through our platform by 34x. Plus, we attracted over 20,000 job applications in the first quarter of 2022!

We believe this momentum speaks to the overall power of the distributed work movement. The best companies in the world are choosing to hire talent wherever it’s found while empowering their teams to work from anywhere. 

Oyster customers (who can recruit job seekers in more than 180 countries) use our platform to pay more than $200 million to global talent each year, including more than $26 million to talent in emerging economies.

The numbers speak for themselves. Oyster is proof that companies don't need an office to create a highly engaged culture. In the last two years, Oyster has:

• Created a vibrant team of 500 employees
• Employed across 60+ countries
• Established a diverse leadership team
• Built an employee base that is 60% female
• Achieved one of the highest employee engagement scores in its class

Just take a look at this timeline to see how much we’ve grown since Oyster’s inception in January 2020:

This Series C round follows a pair of funding rounds in 2021, including a Series A in February and a Series B in June. (We’ve raised a total of $227 million to date!)

You might be wondering, what are we planning to do with this funding round? Well, we’ll be further developing our global employment platform, and investing in the People Ops community. On top of this, we’ll continue our work toward creating a gold standard distributed culture and delivering on our high-impact social mission.

As our CEO and co-founder Tony Jamous puts it, “Distributed work is better for business, better for people, and better for the planet.” Our mission, to create a more equal world by helping companies everywhere hire people anywhere, fuels everything that we do. We're thrilled to work with Georgian and our investor partners on this next step of Oyster’s journey!

To hear more about what our CEO, Tony, had to say about how we’re aligning this investment with our mission, take a look at this blog post. 

About Oyster

Oyster is a global employment platform designed to enable visionary HR leaders to find, hire, pay, manage, develop and take care of a thriving distributed workforce. It lets growing companies give valued international team members the experience they deserve, without the usual headaches or the expense.

Oyster enables hiring anywhere in the world with reliable, compliant payroll, and great local benefits and perks.