Oyster®, the global employment solution to employ, pay, and care for distributed teams, raised $59M in Series D funding, led by Silver Lake Waterman, with participation from existing investors, including Emergence Capital, Stripes, Georgian, G2 Venture Partners, and Endeavor Catalyst. The investment will enable Oyster to accelerate its platform roadmap, scale its impact, improve its customers’ compliance posture, and enhance its customers’ ability to attract and retain top talent. Over 40% of Team Members employed on the Oyster platform are in emerging markets and Oyster remitted hundreds of millions to emerging markets in 2023. This fundraise values the company at $1.2B and brings its total funding to $286M.
“Global employment is incredibly complex, involving many moving parts. Oyster emerged as a best-of-breed solution in the category to solve these traditional challenges,” said Shawn O’Neill, Managing Partner of Silver Lake Waterman. “In just four years, Oyster built a platform of trusted tools and resources for bulletproof global compliance and in-depth local HR knowledge—a strategy that has made them one of the leaders in the market. The team at Oyster is well positioned to continue to deliver the specialized HR solution required for the current global employment experience and we look forward to all that’s ahead.”
In the last year, Oyster launched a variety of products and services to give companies more tools and insights to scale their global operations with confidence. Global Payroll and Visa Sponsorships help simplify operations and support borderless teams, while the Salary Insights tool provides fair compensation recommendations for domestic and international employees. Additionally, Oyster Embedded is the category’s first no-code solution that enables customers to offer global hiring, payroll, and rewards right within their own product.
By enabling partners to focus on what they do best while ensuring global employment is fair and compliant, Oyster has attracted HR Information System and Professional Employer Organization partners like BambooHR and TriNet—giving joint customers the flexibility, scale, and white-glove hiring experience they deserve. In further testament to Oyster’s world-class knowledge and AI capabilities, The Josh Bersin Company selected Oyster as a Trusted Content Partner for its HR AI assistant, Galileo™.
As one of the only B Corp-certified unicorn companies in the world, Oyster’s mission is to create a more equal world by democratizing access to global job opportunities—so everyone, everywhere, has the chance to prosper. Customers like Lokalise, Quora, and Printify choose Oyster to develop sustainable cross-border talent strategies, create competitive offers that attract and retain talent, and stay compliant at every stage of the employment journey. The company’s deep, country-level intelligence automates employment and compliance for more than 180 countries, reducing the burden on internal People, HR, and Payroll teams while saving on high costs of external advice.
“This funding round validates our approach to building the compliance and compensation intelligence infrastructure companies need to drive global growth. We are grateful that the Silver Lake Waterman team shares our belief that global employment shouldn’t be a transactional service—it’s a dynamic relationship that values human potential, fosters innovation, and fuels economic impact,” said Oyster co-founder and CEO, Tony Jamous. “At the heart of Oyster’s success is an unwavering commitment to our mission: we believe that by making it possible for companies everywhere to hire people anywhere, we can create a more sustainable and equitable future for all. We’re proud to contribute to a movement that makes human-centric employment available to workers globally.”
