Omnipresent Raises £11M in Series A Funding

Today, we’re excited to announce our £11m Series A funding. This will allow us to continue to move quickly on our mission to Make Global Teams Work. Coinciding with the New Year, it seems like a good time to reflect on why we started Omnipresent, share some of our story so far, and to look ahead.

We founded Omnipresent with a thesis built on two beliefs:

Belief #1 - Remote working is the future

When starting the company in November 2019, we had a strong conviction that remote work (and with it, more globally distributed teams and businesses) was a present possibility and a future norm. We wrote in February 2020: “It’s not surprising that more and more companies are choosing to go remote. Intense competition for talent, improving collaboration tools, and an ongoing cultural shift are all contributing to a rapid rise in companies looking to attract a global talent pool.”

It was clear to us that these economic and social forces would beat out the behavioural inertia over the long run, but what was unclear was how quickly this would happen. It’s a bit of a cliche, but it’s said that “change often happens slowly, then all at once” and it is certainly true here. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has kickstarted a flywheel of remote adoption driving better remote working tools. Based on our own research, 85% of businesses are planning to stay remote or hybrid when the pandemic passes, but we’re still in the infancy of remote-enabling tools, technologies and techniques. Mass adoption of remote working will lead to amazing innovation on all of these fronts. The remote work experience of 2025 will be far superior to that of 2020, but office work will likely remain more or less the same.

It was also clear that without the constraint of collocation, the adoption of remote work would lead to companies opening up their talent pool globally. Access to international talent brings a deeper talent pool, diversity of ideas, insights and perspectives and also levels the playing field, allowing people to be assessed against merit and company fit without concern for location.

Belief #2 - Running a global business is hard

Companies want to be focused on serving their customers, growing their business and building strong teams. Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever run a business (or worked in one) knows, you end up spending a disproportionate amount of time and energy on admin and bureaucracy.

This is even more pronounced when setting up internationally. Each country (or even state/region/province) has its own rules, regulations, taxes, and registration requirements, not to mention the cultural, time zone and language differences. Navigating this can be a painful messy, and complicated minefield. Historically, only larger companies have really needed to do this, and have been able to pay their way through this complexity with armies of expensive lawyers and finance experts. Guenther and I ran into this problem in previous businesses we’d run - simple, cost effective solutions that actually worked just didn’t exist.

Global teams without the pain = Omnipresent

The drive towards more remote work was directly going to correlate with the drive for many companies to work internationally; but the legal and financial systems weren’t prepared to adapt to this quickly evolving landscape. It was clear to us that global teams could achieve more, but only if they were freed from the red tape and bureaucracy. So we set out to “Make Global Teams Work”.

Omnipresent today does just this. 

We help companies focus on building great global teams instead of the complex admin. By removing that burden, we help companies access and employ the talent they need so they can focus on achieving grander goals such as developing innovative treatments for cancer and building large scale quantum computers (that’s just to name a few of the amazing things our clients are working towards today). 

We also practice what we preach and would not have been able to build such an amazing, high calibre team without having a global approach to our own recruitment. This has given us first-hand insight into the challenges that our clients face.

We’re only just getting started though. We are developing the infrastructure for building globally distributed businesses and have some really exciting things under development that we’re eager to bring to life over the next months and years.

With the backing of some fantastic investors and this new funding round, we will continue to invest into growing our team and helping companies focus on doing great work with great people instead of bureaucracy.

We’re hiring across the team, so if you’re interested in joining us on this journey, check out our openings!