Sarah Hawley @murali-nagarajan great questions! My answers below:

1. Couple of factors. We're specifically designed to help the SME (small-to-medium business) market access this new world of remote talent in a really simple and streamlined way. We understand deeply this market as these were the types of companies I built and sold for the past 10 years. We also have a focus on 'conscious' companies and professionals... people and companies who're looking to work together in new ways, and this is a big trend being driven by Millennials and the next generation. We want to do work that matters in the world. The conscious, culture-first approach is a big part of what's unique to us and our area of connecting and focus with our target market.

2. & 3. Kind of go together. We raised an early pre-seed round at a $7M val cap ($350K oversubscribed in March 2020), and have subsequently raised funding at $15M and $20M val caps (totaling $1.3M to date, $300K of which is at the latest $20M val cap). Our ambition is not to create a $50M company or even a $100M company, our ambition is to redefine work for humanity and in doing so create a Unicorn company. Early stage company valuations are tricky for sure.

An additional note to point out, that may be somewhat helpful, is our continued traction since the launch of this campaign. Once we went live on Republic we are unable to update the slides however I'll post shortly with some high level updates on our traction since launch as I think this will be helpful for you also.

Secondly, as an investor myself, it's always important to me and a great experience to meet the founder so I'd love for you to join our upcoming event specifically for Republic investors: us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEldeupqT0qHtxmZm0R1w8N2EAHTvTXOpTg

Sarah Hawley @matthew-kuntz Thanks Matthew - I absolutely love it too, and it's certainly the future. One surprise that's been awesome is watching companies grow once they've joined and made their first hire (one of the earlier companies now has 13 team members). Once they've experienced how easy it is, and how exciting the global talent pool is they post more and more jobs, and make more hires. This will have an exponential impact over time. Also how quickly we've spread across the globe and the surprising pockets where we gain momentum on the professionals side as they tell their friends about us (Romania being one spot, and South Africa)!

Sarah Hawley Hi @adam-thodey, great question. Virtual Vocations looks to be a curated remote job board, so they pull together remote jobs advertised in various places into a curated list. Growmotely is different in that companies actually engage their team members through our platform and we handle contracts and payroll so we're providing a different level of support (from a technology perspective) than simply putting jobs in front of people. I hope that answers your question - feel free of course to ask more! :)