Oyster Becomes a Unicorn: Fundraising for an Impact-Driven Enterprise

In April 2022, just two years since launch, global employment platform Oyster announced it had achieved a valuation in excess of USD 1 billion, giving it unicorn status, after closing a USD 150 million Series C round. Oyster’s co-founders, Tony Jamous and Jack Mardack, put a social-impact mission front and centre of everything Oyster did: to help create economic opportunity anywhere in the world, regardless of where an employee was based, by enabling companies to hire, onboard, pay and provide benefits to their distributed teams in a locally compliant way. The founders had set ambitious impact targets for the young company in furtherance of this mission. This included two main goals: enabling employment for 90% of the population of new knowledge workers based mainly in emerging markets by the end of 2022, and placing one million job seekers around the world in remote work roles by 2027.Determined to ensure that Oyster’s social-impact mission was a positive differentiator in the distributed work sector, the founders continually sought new ways to generate impact; both in terms of the Oyster platform and with regard to a wider programme of promoting an impact-oriented culture throughout the sector. But what more could they do to achieve the two ambitious goals they had set themselves? Were there other key impact metrics they could target? What were the inhibitors to the change they sought to bring about? Was the impact integrated in the business model as they were scaling up? And would continuing to focus on their social mission come at the expense of remaining competitive in the marketplace vis-à-vis companies who were, to a greater or lesser extent, not impact-driven?