Firstbase, which helps companies ensure new remote hires choose and receive necessary hardware, raises a $50M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins
Bias alert: I am writing to you from my home office — Firstbase announced a Series B round of funding today, led by Kleiner Perkins. Tweets: @alex Tweets: @alex : not doing much more of this sort of coverage, but did catch up with @chris_herd about his company's $50M Series B https://techcrunch.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Firstbase's raise slots into the hardware layer of a remote-work stack that investors have been funding piece by piece: Remote went from a $35M Series A to a $150M Series B at a $1B+ valuation within nine months on the HR-and-payroll side, while Airbase and Homebase took rounds for spend management and SMB team tooling.
For Kleiner Perkins, this is a continuation of the early-stage strategy it laid out with its $600M fund raised after Mary Meeker's departure — seed-to-Series-B bets — now pointed at the logistics of equipping distributed teams rather than the software alone.
First-order effects
- Firstbase gets $50M to scale its core loop — letting new remote hires choose their own hardware and handling delivery and lifecycle management — turning what was a manual IT chore into an outsourced service.
Second-order effects
- Adjacent players in the remote-ops stack, from Remote to later entrants like Remofirst, face pressure to either bundle device provisioning into their platforms or partner with specialists like Firstbase rather than build it themselves.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the remote-work vendor landscape consolidates toward full-stack platforms covering payroll, compliance, and equipment, with point solutions like Firstbase either absorbed as features or entrenched as the dedicated infrastructure layer others plug into.
The trend: Venture capital is assembling a complete remote-work infrastructure stack one layer at a time, with hardware provisioning now funded alongside HR, payroll, and compliance.