Let’s face it, odds are that you’re reading this article from your work-from-home setup. And while it may have seemed like just a temporary situation to some, remote work – in whichever shape or form – is here for good.
Many of us are now able to work remotely, and a recent survey by McKinsey shows that 58% of Americans are able to work from home (WFH) at least 1 day a week, while 38% are able to WFH as much as they want.
This development is all thanks to the rapid pace of technological innovation that we’ve seen in the last few decades.
It just took a global event like the pandemic to make everyone realize how empowering the technology we’ve created actually is.
And it’s not just better hardware. The real driver behind our move to remote work has been software, which has enabled us to recreate the tools and settings that served us so well in our pre-pandemic work environment: a whiteboard to ideate (Miro), a gathering place to communicate ideas (Slack), and a shared hard drive or operating system that holds all of our work (Google Workspace / Microsoft 365).
In fact, software is so abundant that many companies don’t even know how many tools they’re subscribed to. That’s why we created the all-in-one software management tool perfect for remote friendly startups. Discover Cledara today.
With so many startups now able to embrace remote work (some even going remote-first), we decided to highlight a few of the innovators that work entirely remote, or enable their employees to work remotely for a portion of the workweek. Below, you’ll find a curated list of 15 high-growth and remote-friendly startups across a broad range of industries.
How we shortlisted the entries
Given the rise of remote-first or hybrid work, there were plenty of startups vying for a place on our list.
We made a selection of startups from various sectors that had demonstrated growth and innovation. We also prioritized companies that generated interest from investors or managed to successfully bootstrap their companies.
So who made the cut? Let’s find out.
Remote Friendly Startups
1. Slab
Slab is a modern knowledge base and wiki for teams whose mission is to make the workplace a source of learning and purpose through knowledge-sharing. The company is fully remote, with teams across the world. To date, Slab has raised $2.2M from investors to build their product.
Founders: Anvisha Pai, Chengyin Liu, Jason Chen
*Our users manage their Slab subscription on Cledara.
2. Tyk
Tyk is an open-source API management platform. They’re big on inclusivity and allow employees to work from anywhere in the world, from a bed or from a beach, whatever suits employees best. With big plans to continue its expansion, the company raised €35M in 2021.
Founders: James Hirst, Martin Buhr
3. Olark
Olark provides live chat software for over 11,000 small businesses around the world. From a small group of 4 employees in Palo Alto, they’ve grown into a fully remote team that spans multiple time zones. After receiving initial funding from Y Combinator, they’ve managed to defy the status quo by walking away from subsequent funding offers and acquisition discussions, bootstrapping almost everything from the ground up for over 10 years.
Founders: Ben Congleton, Zach Steindler, Matt Pizzimenti, Roland Osborne
4. Oyster
Oyster is a distributed HR platform that empowers companies to hire, pay, and care for talented teammates regardless of their location. Truly decentralized, it proudly claims to be a borderless and HQ-less company with teammates spread across 70+ countries. In April of 2022 Oyster closed a massive $150M Series C led by Georgian, which pushed its valuation past 1B and into unicorn territory.
Founders: Jack Mardack, Tony Jamous
5. Moonpay
MoonPay is a financial technology company that builds payment infrastructure for crypto. It’s a remote-first company that provides its team autonomy to move fast, innovate and take responsibility from anywhere in the world. In 2021, Moonpay secured a mind-boggling $555M Series A investment to further develop its product.
Founders: Ivan Soto-Wright and Victor Faramond
6. Spruce Systems
Spruce Systems is an open-source decentralized identity platform. It builds credentials infrastructure that is standards-compliant, production-ready, and extensible into typical enterprise and government IT systems. Spruce systems work fully remotely and the company champions diversity, inclusion, and a family-friendly work environment.
Founders: Gregory Rocco, Jacob Blish, Wayne Chang
7. Canopy
Canopy offers Practice Management software for businesses around the world. Canopy has been fully remote since 2020, but has recently switched to a hybrid model that allows employees to work remotely 2 days a week. At the end of 2021, the company raised $35M in Series BB funding to facilitate further development.
Founders: Kurt Avarell
8. Highlight
Highlight is a female-owned market research platform that facilitates efficient, agile, and scaled in-home product testing. The company promotes a flexible, remote WFH culture with a so-called ‘optional office space’ in NYC’s Hearst tower. In March of 2022, Highlight closed an $8.2M funding round to continue its efforts to modernize in-home product testing.
Founders: Dana Kim, Ethan Kellough
9. Causal
Causal refers to themselves as an ‘excel-killer’. The company combined the best of spreadsheets and programming to create a better tool for performing calculations, visualizing data, and communicating with numbers. Causal is run by a small team with many remote-first roles and in March of 2022, the company raised $15M from investors.
Founders: Lukas Köbis, Taimur Abdaal
10. Lily AI
Lily AI is on a mission to build the language and platform that supercharges the entire retail stack. The company uses AI to build various products to help retailers and brands increase full-margin sales, reduce assortment complexity, and use data analytics to identify the most profitable SKUs. They’re keen on remote-first workers and offer remote team-building activities to their employees.
Founders: Purva Gupta, Sowmiya Chocka Narayanan
11. Sowork
Sowork has fully embraced the promise of remote work by building a virtual co-working platform designed to help companies and teams to work remotely. Its mission is to take work from earth to the cloud and in 2021 the company raised a $15M seed round from investors.
Founders: Emma Giles, Mark Liu, Vishal Punwani
12. Aptible
Aptible enables companies to deploy a secure, HIPAA-compliant app from day one. The company has been working fully decentralized since its first employee. Its team is spread across North America — from Vancouver to San Francisco to Dallas to Detroit to New York. In 2019 Aptible raised $19.1M from investors to complement its product development efforts.
Founders: Chas Ballew, Frank Macreery
13. AToB
AToB is a technology company building payment infrastructure for the transportation industry. AtoB is building Stripe for Transportation — modernizing the payments infrastructure for trucking and logistics, where capital movement occurs quickly and transparently. AToB is hiring mostly remote positions and closed a $155M series B round in the summer of 2022.
Founders: Harshita Arora, Tushar Misra, Vignan Velivela
14. Accord
Accord is a customer-facing collaboration platform that helps B2B startups build repeatable, collaborative Sales & Onboarding processes. The company launched with $6M in seed funding and it’s built a remote-first business with a small office hub in San Francisco.
Founders: Ross Rich, Ryan Rich, Wayne Pan
15. TRM Labs
TRM Labs allows customers to monitor, detect and investigate crypto fraud and financial crime. With an injection of $60M in series B at the end of 2021, TRM Labs has continued to scale operations in 2022 and is actively hiring for many remote positions.
Founders: Esteban Castaño, Rahul Raina
Did we miss one of your favorite startups and think it should be on our list? Let us know at hello@cledara.com.
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