Oyster shucks $150 million clams, shown to a table at the unicorn club

Distributed HR platform with London roots, Oyster has raised $150 million in a Series C funding round. The capital will be used to further develop the Oyster platform as well as bolster the company's headcount. To date, the crest of Oysters’ wave peaks at $227 million, and the company is now valued at over $1 billion.

In line with a number of other HR tech companies we’ve seen, or saw spring up at the beginning of the pandemic, Oyster is out to provide a mechanism whereby companies can hire, pay, and provide for globally distributed teams, all the while remaining 100% locally compliant.

The startup counts organisations including Quora, lokalise, HiPeople, Firstbase, Hubble, and perchpeek amongst its client base, reports a revenue growth rate of more than 20x in 2021, and attracting the attention of some 20,000+ job applicants in Q1 of this year.

"Distributed work is better for business, better for people, and better for the planet," said Oyster co-founder and CEO Tony Jamous. "Our mission, to create a more equal world by helping companies everywhere hire people anywhere, fuels everything that we do. It's thanks to the strength and impact of that mission that we have been able to grow our team and business in such an unprecedented way.”

Oyster’s $150 million Series C funding round was led by previous round lead Georgian, with Salesforce Ventures, LinkedIn, the Base10 Partners Advancement Initiative, Okta, and Endeavor Catalyst participating. All previous investors, Stripes, Emergence Capital, PayPal Ventures, Slack Fund, Avid Ventures, PeopleTech Partners, and HR Tech Investments, an affiliate of Indeed followed on.

"The Oyster team is one of the most mission-aligned companies we've ever seen," said Georgian’s Margaret Wu. "They're the kind of company we deeply admire—not just a unicorn, but an 'impact-unicorn,' a business that creates enormous value as the direct result of its social impact mission.”