A step ahead

An HR tech services platform founded in the UAE, a pay-per-minute chauffeur service and a growing classifieds business in Kuwait are the SMEs on our radar this month

ability to execute new ideas and the speed of that execution. I think building a framework of decision-making can help a lot in prioritising and identifying the opportunities and challenges to address.

What is the core concept of RemotePass?

We’re working to create a world where anyone can work from anywhere while having access to benefits and financial services. By taking the complexity out of the process and making it a clickthrough experience, we are reinventing payroll and benefits for forward-looking companies and their remote teams.

Companies of different sizes use our platform to build and manage global remote teams. They rely on our solution to establish employment and contractor contracts, manage day-to-day HR operations and process mass cross-border payroll in over 120 countries and in more than 80 currencies.

What were the challenges you encountered when setting it up?

I think understanding the global HR industry was and is still one of the toughest challenges, as labour laws and processes differ from country to country. Certain technical aspects require a lot of research, external advisory and documentation (payroll, taxation, legislation, etc.)

There is also the complexity of building a flexible and compliant platform with global standards and finding the right resources. You can add to that the difficulty in convincing global providers to dedicate time and resources in the beginning when we had registered only a few transactions.

We’ve recently secured a pre-series A

4Sale is Kuwait’s largest online classifieds platform – a platform where people come together to buy and sell goods and services. Our easy-to-use platform is hugely popular, we connect over a million active users a month – that’s one in four people in Kuwait.

Since our inception, we have helped 1.7 million registered users sell over 13.1 million items and services. Currently, we receive over 6,000 new listings every day, and that number is growing.

We charge a flat fee for individual listings in specific categories and have a wide sector coverage, including automotive, electronics, human resources, property and services.

Our growth is reflected by our commercial performance. We are profitable and from 2015-2019, our EBITDA grew at a CAGR of 35.3 per cent. In the same period, our revenue grew at a CAGR of 27.4 per cent.

We have already successfully divested a 56 per cent holding to NBK – its endorsement as a strategic investor, speaks volumes.

What are the company’s expansion plans?

Our operations are deliberately [focused on] Kuwait only. We have a deep understanding of our market. It is a Kuwaiti solution for Kuwaiti consumers, and appeals to the trading culture of Kuwaitis.