Headquartered in Singapore Skuad helps companies hire employees in different countries while complying with local employment regulations and handling cross-border payroll. The startup announced today that it has raised US$15 million in Series A funding. To date, Skuad has more than 350 employers, mostly from North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. .
This funding round, which brings Skuad’s total raised to $19 million, was led by NMVM and two global payment platforms. It also includes participation from returning investors Beenext and Anthemis, plus angel investors Jitendra Gupta, founder of Jupiter; Pine Labs CEO, Amrish Rau; Credit Founder Kunal Shah; Alok Mittal, Co-Founder and CEO of Indifi; Varun Mittal and Rafael Lopez.
Skuad was conceived just before the 2019 pandemic by founder Sundeep Sahi with the aim of simplifying international recruitment. Since then, the company’s focus has been on helping employers address issues that make building a distributed team challenging, like regulatory changes from one market to another. , international payroll and remote referrals. Skuad also serves as a platform for workers to find jobs.
Sahi told TechCrunch that traditional recruiting and hiring methods aren’t enough to tackle creating a pool of people around the world.
“Building distributed teams or recruiting in another country requires you to set up a subsidiary, register as an organization, open a local bank account, update employment laws local, as well as hiring local HR, legal, and payroll teams. This process often takes months, if not years, and requires investments of thousands of dollars,” he said.
Skuad allows companies to hire, recommend, and pay employees and contractors in more than 160 countries without the need to set up local organizations, while managing local compliance, and providing country-specific insurance and benefits packages. Most of their clients come from the technology and consulting industries that employ digital workers in different geographies to fill talent gaps or scale internationally.
The startup currently has customers from 34 countries, talent is placed in about 94 companies and 3x growth in ARR since January 2022.
One of Skuad’s clients is Indonesian fintech Akseleran, which needs to fill technology gaps. It has built a strong candidate channel through a moderated talent portal called allremote.in, the social network of jobs, recruiters and agencies. Skuad acts as the legal employer in India, as Akseleran has no legal entity in the country and manages local compliance for payments, taxes and benefits.
Skuad earns through pricing plans starting at $199 per employee per month for payroll and $499 per employee per month for talent found through the platform or 12% of remuneration employees, whichever is higher. The company is currently completing the acquisition of Codejudge, a data-centric talent assessment platform that automates tech interviews, to expand its hiring and referral capabilities.
Some of the competitors in the remote recruiting space include Deel, Remote, Globalization Partners, and Multiplier. Skuad serves as a hybrid between talent platforms, such as Turing and Toptal, but focuses on remote full-time jobs supported by a network of local organizations that handle salaries compliantly. player, as Deel and Remote did. Sahi says they differentiate themselves by the transparency of the process and the scale of their tech-enabled talent platform, which can be used to manage the entire employment lifecycle.
