Omnipresent Raises $14.5M in Series A Funding

Omnipresent announces it closed its Series A funding round and raised a total of $14.5M ( £11M). This round follows its initial seed round that took place only five months ago. This new funding will allow the company to continue to move quickly on its mission to “Make Global Teams Work.” 

The company announces the end of this funding round during the New Year, offering the opportunity to reflect on why Omnipresent was started and its journey so far. The company was founded with a thesis built on two beliefs.

Belief #1 - Remote Working Is the Future

When starting the company in November 2019, Omnipresent had the strong conviction that remote work (and with it, more globally distributed teams and businesses) was a present possibility and a future norm. In February 2020, company Co-founder, Matthew Wilson stated, “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 that these economic and social forces would beat out the behavioral inertia over the long run, but what was unclear was how quickly this would happen. It’s a bit of a cliché, but it’s said that “change often happens slowly, then all at once” and it’s certainly true here. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has kickstarted a flywheel of remote adoption driving better remote working tools. Based on the company’s own research, 85% of businesses are planning to stay remote or hybrid when the pandemic passes, but are 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 Difficult

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.

These difficulties are even more pronounced when setting up internationally. Each country (or even states, regions or provinces) 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. Omnipresent co-founders Guenther Eisinger and Matthew Wilson Guenther have both run into this problem in previous businesses where 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 Omnipresent that global teams could achieve more, but only if they were freed from the red tape and bureaucracy. As such, the company set out to “Make Global Teams Work”. Omnipresent today does just this. 

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

Omnipresent also practices what it preaches. It has been able to build an amazing, high-caliber team only by having a global approach to its own recruitment. This has provided them with first-hand insight into the challenges clients face every day.

Just Getting Started

Omnipresent is developing the infrastructure for building globally distributed businesses and has some really exciting things under development they’re eager to bring to life over the next months and years.

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