Kota, formerly known as Yonder, an all-in-one platform to automate insurance and retirement benefits for modern teams, has successfully closed a €5 million seed round led by EQT Ventures with follow-on investment from existing investors Northzone and Frontline Ventures. Other notable investors include Job Van Der Voort of Remote.com, Romain Huet formerly of Stripe, now Open AI, David Clarke formerly of Workday and others in the oversubscribed round.
The Irish startup is transforming the complex and paper-heavy core benefits category with a platform that makes the process delightfully easy – companies of all sizes can get started in under 8 minutes. Existing customers include growing companies like &Open, Spotlight Oral Care, Unmind and Fonoa. With coverage in over 30 countries, Kota is modernising the $42.1bn1 employee benefits industry, starting in Europe, by building the infrastructure and tools for companies and platforms to cover their teams – increasing access to quality financial benefit products for a generation underserved by legacy infrastructure.
Luke Mackey, Co-Founder and CEO of Kota, said: “Employee health and retirement benefits are the Achilles heel of HR and finance teams. They are managed through spreadsheets, portals and email – completely fragmented, offline and lacking interoperability. This is little surprise given, unlike other areas of HR and Finance where modern tools have revolutionised workflows, this industry is still dominated by old-school brokerages with an admin-heavy model. Kota is first to market with a platform that is automating workflows through data synchronisation and reconciliation, integrating with top-tier health, life and pension providers, and ultimately, delivering employees access to the benefits that they deserve.”
Companies of all sizes are under pressure to do more, with fewer resources. This burden is significant for small to midsize companies that can’t afford to spend vast amounts of resources on providing the best employee benefits, and the challenge is particularly present for remote companies that are contending with different approaches to benefits from country to country. Meanwhile, the core benefits industry has become a black box – seeming inaccessible and outdated for smaller, more distributed companies whilst typically providing a challenging user experience for employees.
Founded in 2022, Kota provides simple and borderless access to health, life and retirement providers globally with real-time enrolment, flexible contributions, and an employee app. Kota has already integrated with leading health insurance, life insurance and pension providers such as, Irish Life, Allianz Partners, Smart Pension, and others so that employers can now easily set up, manage, automate and reconcile their benefits internationally in one place. The platform also syncs with companies’ existing HR tools like Personio, Humaans, HiBob, Bamboo HR and Workday.
“Previous attempts at bringing the employee benefits market to the 21st century have all fallen short, and there’s a tendency in this industry to follow a ‘tech-enabled’ rather than a ‘tech-first’ approach,” commented Naza Metghalchi, Principal at EQT Ventures. “The complexity of the financial benefits ecosystem has been amplified with the tailwinds of remote work. The entire industry has been missing a data synchronisation and reconciliation piece––until Kota. With connections to both local and global providers, they’ve made enrolling, scaling and managing team benefits anywhere in the world as effortless as ordering dinner online, initially focusing on Europe. Kota is creating a new category by providing the critical infrastructure for the distribution of financial products, at a time when employees rely on their workplace to access these products. We’ve been impressed with Luke, Patrick and Deepak’s ability to ship fast, and are excited for them to execute their long term vision.”
Kota is run by a fintech and product focused team of operators and insurance veterans from companies like Bolt, Wayflyer, MetLife, Truelayer and Smart Pension. Co-founded by Luke Mackey, second-time founder and a former country manager at mobility giant Bolt, Patrick O’Boyle former CTO at Bamboo, and Deepak Baliga, who led engineering teams at unicorn Flipdish.
Kota is also announcing the launch of its embedded health insurance product to enable platforms and developers to embed financial benefits products into their own platforms to increase access. By doing so, Kota can become the rails for distributing traditional core benefits product to the digital first world of HR and finance tools.
