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          Home Portfolio Oyster
          oysterhr.com

          Founded: January 2020

          Partnered since: Pre-Seed

          Current Stage: Series C

          Valuation: $1 billion +

          Team

          Andrew Banks

          Nick Fairclough

          Domain

          Enterprise

          Region

          North America

          EMEA

          APAC

          Summary

          Founded by Tony Jamous and Jack Mardack, Oyster is a platform that simplifies the process of hiring across international borders at global scale. Enabling seamless hiring, benefits administration and payroll for employers, while helping employees get hired, get paid and develop skills, Oyster unlocks a new reality of remote work.

          OUR PARTNERSHIP

          At the outset of our partnership with Oyster, we worked hand in hand with Tony Jamous to define the organisation that he would need to build. In determining the organisational cadence of the business, considering the talent requirements for a new vertical and devising how that talent could be developed to capture an emerging market opportunity, our partnership formed a critical foundation for a period of rapid growth. The organisation expanded from 0 to more than 600 employees across 72 different countries. Over 3 rounds of fundraising, Oyster has raised over $250 million and is positioned for a market leadership position in an extremely valuable, high-growth category.

          $230m

          raised

          $1bn+

          valuation

          500+

          employees globally

          Reflecting on his first venture, a cloud-based SMS API which grew to $100m in revenue in less than 5 years, Tony Jamous realised that proactively securing top-tier talent was the only way to be the category leader and most successfully deliver your idea and vision.

          Tony came to us when Oyster was nothing more than a one-side piece of paper, pre-product, pre-team. In January 2020, Faraday began advising the company. Together, we crafted out the strategy for what the company would become from an organisational point of view, working from the basis that talent would be at the core of the business. 

          Key Activities

          01

          Building Organisational Foundations

          Tony and I began by building out the principles of the company, determining how the company would work and what skills we would need to achieve our objectives. We built a prototype for the category and industry by evaluating the landscape, assessing potential challenges and determining measures of success.   

           

           

          02

          Developing Employer Brand & Business Identity

          Developing the outline proposition for the Employer Brand of the business was very much focused around social impact as the core identity of the company. The story we crafted around the opportunity to change the shape of local economies proved to resonate with talent and secure investment into the company’s vision. 

           

           

          03

          Seed Funding: $4.2 million

          In March 2020, Oyster secured $4.2 million in seed funding, shortly before the world went into lockdown.

           

           

           

           

           

          04

          Executive Team Build

          We began building our start-up team, a squad of people to get the company moving. Top-tier, high pedigree candidates were non-negotiable. As we realised what Oyster was – a compliance engine –  we focused on bringing people into the business who had expertise in, for example, cross-border buying and selling of products and international equity exchange. Each hire was carefully handpicked, forming a team curated for their skills to address the core functional and fundamental challenges that this business had to solve.

          05

          Series A: $20 million

          In January 2021, Oyster raised $20 million in its series A funding round. We continued to hire and expand our leadership team.

           

           

           

           

           

          06

          Series B: $50 million

          In July 2021, Oyster raised $50 million in its series B funding round, led by Stripes, with participation from PayPal ventures (interested in the moving of money around the world at scale) and Recruit Holdings (owner of indeed.com & Glassdoor; interested in talent subjects).

           

           

           

          07

          Continued Growth & Expansion

          Post-Series B, we added a number of top players to the team. Setting a high bar for talent from the outset in turn increased our capacity to attract more top-tier candidates as we grew. We continued to focus on Talent Development, providing guidance to the early team and adopting the role of talent expert within the organisation.  

           

           

          08

          Series C: $150 million

          In April 2022, Oyster raised $150 million in its series C funding round, led by Georgian, and achieved unicorn status. Investors felt Oyster had a “Series F team in a Series C stage company”; they backed our people because it was clear they were experienced, capable and effective at delivering results. Building the most accomplished organisation in the category was only made possible because we had laid the foundations early for a high-pedigree, high-performance organisation. 

          Outcome

          As a proven entrepreneur, Tony knew that you can’t be successful on your own; you can have the best idea, the biggest market, but it’s all about the team. Faraday bridged the gap between founder and talent. The outcome was investors prepared to put $230 million behind the business and exponential growth within two and a half years. Oyster HR couldn’t have got this profile without its people, and it couldn’t have got its people without working with Faraday.

          If you are serious about building a really accomplished company, you need to be integrating Organisational Design, Leadership Hiring and Talent Development. When this is sequenced correctly, it can deliver exponential performance for investors and founders.

          Andrew and Faraday Partners have been instrumental in helping me build Oyster from the very start. The ability to build an organisational plan, handpick expert talent for clearly defined needs and then develop the organisation alongside me has made Oyster a more effective proposition and only increased our impact and our valuation. Our investors at Series C, where we achieved a billion plus valuation in record time, wrote their investor pack titled, ‘A Series C business with a Series F team’ - none of that could have been possible without Faraday on board and we are set to deliver on our promise whilst I have been able to focus on the role I wanted to play in creating our business and market.

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