They Made Their Payroll Startup Profitable First. Then They Went Looking for Growth Capital.

Most fintech startups raise money to chase growth, then figure out profitability later, if ever.

Kamal Reggad and Karim Nadi did it backwards.

Their company, RemotePass, reached profitability in early 2025.

Only after hitting that milestone did the founders decide to raise a larger round to accelerate growth, rather than the more familiar sequence of burning venture capital to reach scale first.

That decision paid off. RemotePass has now raised $17.4 million in a Series B round led by EBRD Venture Capital, the venture arm of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, with participation from 500 Global and existing investors.

Built From an Underserved Starting Point

Reggad and Nadi founded RemotePass in the UAE in 2021, solving a problem that's genuinely harder outside the US and Western Europe: hiring, paying, and supporting workers across borders where local entity setup, compliance requirements, and banking infrastructure remain difficult to navigate.

Most well-known global employment platforms were built with a US or European home base first, then expanded elsewhere.

RemotePass did the opposite, building specifically to serve the Middle East and North Africa region from day one, an area where incumbent platforms have historically had limited depth or reach.

That starting point matters for how the company has grown.

RemotePass is described as the only global employment platform with more than five years of deep operating experience specifically supporting businesses and workers across MENA.

Why EBRD Backing This Round Is Unusual

The EBRD Venture Capital arm doesn't typically lead venture rounds for growth-stage startups chasing high burn rates. Its broader mandate leans toward backing economically sustainable businesses, which made RemotePass's early profitability a meaningful prerequisite rather than just a nice-to-have data point for this specific investor.

That's a genuinely different investor validation signal than a typical Silicon Valley-style growth round, where investor interest is often driven primarily by user growth curves rather than proven unit economics.

The Real Numbers Behind the Raise

RemotePass has scaled to support more than 35,000 workers across over 150 countries, and has facilitated more than $800 million in cross-border payroll payments to date.

CEO Reggad has pointed out that this scale was reached on a fraction of the capital raised by category leaders in global employment, a notable claim given that well-funded competitors in this space have raised substantially larger rounds to reach comparable scale.

The company's client roster includes recognizable names like Logitech, Tata Group, InDrive, and Careem, giving RemotePass real enterprise credibility beyond smaller startup customers.

What RemotePass Actually Does

RemotePass operates as an employer of record, meaning it assumes legal responsibility for employing workers on behalf of client companies in countries where those companies don't have a local legal entity, handling compliance, payroll, and administrative risk directly.

In late 2025, the company expanded beyond core payroll with SpendCards, embedding corporate expense cards directly into the same platform used to pay the workforce.

That move consolidates payroll, contractor payments, and spend management into a single system, rather than requiring companies to stitch together separate tools for each function.

The company has also introduced AI agents aimed at automating onboarding, compliance checks, and support functions, a natural next step for a platform managing complex, country-specific regulatory requirements at scale.

What This Round Is Actually For

Reggad has framed this raise around acceleration rather than survival, a meaningfully different framing than most funding announcements in a sector that's seen plenty of startups burn through capital without reaching sustainable unit economics.

The funding will go toward expanding commercial presence specifically in Europe and the US, deepening the company's financial infrastructure product for distributed teams, and continuing investment in its AI roadmap.

The Honest Read

Global employment and payroll is a genuinely crowded category, with well-known competitors like Deel, Rippling, and Remote all chasing similar customers with significantly larger war chests.

RemotePass's real differentiator isn't a single dramatic feature. 

It's the combination of proven profitability, deep MENA-region expertise most competitors lack, and a comparatively capital-efficient path to meaningful scale.

Whether that efficiency-first approach can hold up as RemotePass pushes harder into the more competitive, better-funded US and European markets, where rivals have deeper pockets and more brand recognition, is the real test this Series A capital is funding