Remitly co-founder gives up COO role

Josh Hug, co-founder of Seattle-based remittance company Remitly Global Inc. (Nasdaq: RELY), is leaving the company's chief operating officer role.

The move went into effect Monday, according to a regulatory filing. Hug will serve as vice chair and will remain on Remitly's board.

Remitly said in the filing that, in his new role, Hug "will contribute to our company and product strategy and lead other key projects to accelerate customer delivery."

A Remitly spokesperson said the vice chair role is a full-time senior leadership role at the company, and his COO responsibilities will be handled by the rest of Remitly's leadership team.

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Hug co-founded Remitly in 2011. According to his LinkedIn page, he spent the first five years with the company as its chief product officer before taking the COO role in 2016. Before Remitly, he co-founded the social cataloging website Shelfari in 2006 and was its CEO until the company sold to Amazon in 2008. He ran Shelfari within Amazon for three years after the acquisition. Earlier in his career, he spent about seven years at RealNetworks.

Remitly allows customers to send money internationally through a bank deposit, cash pickup or mobile wallet. Its services are available in more than 170 countries and territories. Remitly went public in 2021. At the time of Remitly's initial public offering, Hug said the company was prepared for the extra scrutiny of being a public company because, as a fintech company, Remitly already had strict regulatory hurdles to clear.

"That culture created the right discipline for us to make sure that we're solving customer problems, which is first and foremost, but doing it in the right way and not taking short cuts," Hug said at the time.

In May 2023, Remitly shuttered its immigrant-focused digital banking service, called Passbook. Co-founder and CEO Matt Oppenheimer attributed the decision to Passbook falling outside Remitly's core customer segment. Remitly had over 2,700 full-time employees as of the end of 2023, up from over 1,600 at the time of the 2021 IPO.

Remitly generated $269.1 million in revenue during the first quarter, up 32% year over year. The company recorded a net loss of $21.1 million during the quarter, down from $28.3 million during the first quarter of last year. Remitly had 6.2 million active customers during the quarter, up 36% year over year.

On May 7, Remitly named Ronit Peled as the company's chief people officer. Peled had been the chief people officer at Bellevue-based education tech company DreamBox Learning for more than two years before joining Remitly. She reports to René Yoakum, the company's executive vice president of customer and culture.

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