The Dubai-founded global employment and payroll platform reached profitability in early 2025 before taking the round.

The Dubai-founded global employment and payroll platform reached profitability in early 2025 before taking the round. EBRD Venture Capital led; 500 Global is the new strategic name alongside.\ RemotePass, the global employment, payroll, and spend platform co-founded by Kamal Reggad and Karim Nadi, has raised $17.4m in Series B funding led by EBRD Venture Capital, the company said on Tuesday. 500 Global joins the round as a new strategic investor, alongside returning backers Oraseya Capital, 212 VC, Access Bridge Ventures, and Khwarizmi Ventures. The round comes 14 months after the company’s $5.5m Series A in March 2024 led by 212 VC, and takes total funding to roughly $23m on the company’s accounting of prior rounds. The structural detail in the announcement is the profitability claim. RemotePass reached profitability in early 2025 and reinvested the operating-leverage runway in expansion rather than banking it. Profitable HR-and-payroll-tech companies are unusual in the current vintage; the category is dominated by venture-scale platforms (Deel, Remote, Rippling, Velocity Global) operating on negative unit economics underwritten by repeated late-stage rounds. RemotePass is positioning itself as the discipline-led entrant. What RemotePass sells is a category that has narrowed in the past two years. The platform handles Employer of Record (EOR) services, contractor management, cross-border payroll and compliance across more than 150 countries, with a fintech layer giving workers USD accounts, global cards and health insurance on top. The company’s own published numbers put it at 35,000-plus workers across the platform and $800m-plus in cross-border payroll facilitated to date. Named customers include Logitech, Tata Group, InDrive, and Careem. The product expansion, accelerating the company’s growth, is the fintech layer. In late 2025, RemotePass launched SpendCards, embedding corporate expense cards into the same platform that runs payroll. Expense management has been the operational layer cross-border HR incumbents have struggled with the most; finance teams running distributed workforces have historically had to stitch together payroll providers, expense-card issuers and reimbursement systems. RemotePass’s bet is that the integration of those three is itself the product differentiation. Chief executive Kamal Reggad framed the round in operational terms: ‘We have the product, the traction, and now the partners to expand properly. Hiring is just the entry point. What companies actually need is a platform that supports their teams end-to-end, including the financial services that make distributed work function.’ The framing is positioning a category convergence as much as a product release. Global employment and embedded fintech, on Reggad’s read, are now the same business; RemotePass is structuring the round around that thesis. EBRD Venture Capital is the venture arm of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, with a mandate across Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the southern and eastern Mediterranean. Principal Amine Chabane framed RemotePass as ‘building a leading platform from an emerging market, with the product depth and commercial momentum to compete in Europe and the US’. 500 Global managing partner Amjad Ahmad added that ‘the emerging market depth, embedded fintech layer, and early AI investment create structural advantages that are hard to replicate’. Deel, RemotePass’s largest competitor, was last reported to be managing in-house payroll teams in over 130 countries and serving 35,000-plus customers. RemotePass’s claim is that the incumbents have underserved cross-border employment cases involving emerging-market entities, banking infrastructure, and compliance complexity. The MENA-anchored framing is consistent with the wider regional fintech cycle. Dubai has become an increasingly defended fintech hub over the past three years, with the UAE hosting the majority of the region’s most-funded startups and the city itself positioning as a launchpad for emerging-market-founded businesses scaling globally. RemotePass is the workforce-and-fintech variant of that thesis. The broader labour-market context is tightening. Standard Chartered told investors on Tuesday that the bank would cut more than 15% of its back-office roles by 2030, in part by replacing what its CEO called ‘lower-value human capital’ with AI. Multiverse’s $70m round earlier this month was framed around the upskilling-versus-replacing trade. RemotePass’s pitch is that it sits inside that intersection. The company has not disclosed post-money valuation, run-rate revenue, or the geographic split of planned commercial expansion. The next twelve months of new-customer logo announcements will determine whether the Europe-US push lands at scale or whether the company remains an MENA-anchored player with international optionality.

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