Portal, a startup that helps distributed companies streamline international payouts and compliance for their remote workforce, announces $350 000 in funding from a group of international angel investors led by Adriaan Kolff. The funds will be used to accelerate post MVP product development and support a more aggressive growth strategy.
Remote work grew 156% in the last 5 years prior to Covid-19 pandemic, which accelerated its adoption over 10X in just several months. Yet, 90% of companies surveyed by BVP in 2020 think today’s HR & payroll tools focused on globally distributed workforce are insufficient. Hiring in multiple jurisdictions and tightening regulations around the world is rapidly increasing complexity and amount of admin work companies need to deal with. At the same time, remote companies are under pressure to create a great experience for their teams working remotely — leaving less and less room for admin and compliance work.
Portal helps distributed companies bridge that gap and streamline admin work, run international payouts and reduce legal risks associated with distributed operations. When your existing workforce is moved to Portal, a centralised source of information is created, saving you hours per month by fully automating payouts and multiple other recurring processes. Also, Portal Pro upgrade gives a compliance superpower and works like having a local legal expert in each country where the company is present, only at 1/10th of the cost.
Portal has managed to rally an exceptional team of people behind its mission, including ones that helped build companies like Revolut, Transferwise, and Google.
"While building remote engineering teams at Global Talent and leading its operations on the scale of hundreds of people, I realised how little tools there are to help run and scale admin and compliance for distributed set-up. We looked at what "remote veterans" do and realised they use workarounds and manual labour to deal with this complexity and also spending massive amounts on legal. After over 100 companies signed-up for our beta, we started to hear how desperate and stressed some of them are, it became clear we were on the right path", said Andrew Bondarenko, CEO and Founder of Portal.
In just several months over 100 companies signed up for Portal Beta waitlist and since MVP release in late September Portal is already running pilots with the first batch of early customers, with the plans to make it available for more companies soon.
Commenting on leading the investment round Adriaan notes the following: "As a founder of a distributed company I had to deal with the struggles of compliance and payrolling in multiple countries. Andrew has created a payroll and compliance solution that solves exactly this. I truly share Portal vision that remote work will continue to grow exponentially, and that talent can be found everywhere. That's why I am so excited to lead this angel round."
Portal itself is a distributed company with the team, advisors, and investors spread over 10 different countries. The whole fundraising process was also done fully remotely, 0 offline meetings were held. Investors that participated in the round include serial HR entrepreneur Maarten van der Kwaak, Usabilla founder, Paul Veugen, and one of the Netherlands most successful angel investors Marijn Pijnenborg.