London-based Ravio, a compensation benchmarking platform, has raised a $12m Series A round led by Spark Capital, with participation from Blackbird and Cherry Ventures.
According to startup specialist consultancy Kruze Consulting, compensation typically represents more than three quarters of a company’s operating costs. Yet Ravio says many organisations calculate packages based on incomplete data that can be between 12-18 months old.
This can cause multiple issues, including employees being paid below market standard and pay inequalities emerging between existing employees and new hires.
Inadequate benchmarking can also contribute to widening the gender pay gap. The unadjusted pay gap — which calculates average earnings of men and women without considering external factors like which country they work in and what job they do — stands at 24% in European tech, according to the latest figures from Ravio.
“Without benchmarking, companies operate in the dark. There’s less consistency, less awareness of where change is needed most, and progress can’t be championed or celebrated as effectively,” Raymond Siems, Ravio’s cofounder and CPTO told Sifted.
Ravio was founded in 2022 by Siems, an exited entrepreneur, and two ex-Deliveroo managers Roy Blanga and Merten Wulfert, Ravio’s co-CEOs.
Wulfert experienced the difficulties of setting up fair compensation first hand at Deliveroo. He remembers being asked by the company’s founder Will Shu to fix compensation after the company had grown from 30 to 1,000 people in a year. But he had no recent data or benchmarks to set things up fairly.
Ravio aims to save other companies from these headaches — it gives them market benchmarks and compensation management software to help them offer employees fair salary, benefits and equity packages.
The company’s platform pulls data from 46 countries and over 100 roles, enabling companies to look at salaries at the individual, job type and company level to compare them to peers in the market. It also provides tools to help leaders simplify pay bands and run merit cycles.
Ravio says it has grown 400% in ARR in the last twelve months with its annual subscription model. It currently has 1,200 customers including Just Eat Takeaway, Octopus Energy and fintechs such as Wise, Adyen and Mollie.
The company is operating in an increasingly crowded market. In addition to compensation consultancies such as Mercer, AON Radford, Willis Towers Watson which run salary surveys, it also has startup competitors such as Figures and Compete. Other HR tech companies like Lattice have recently added benchmarking products to their offering too.
Ravio plans to use the fresh funding to expand its dataset to include new regions around the world, with a focus on Europe, and industries such as fintech, biotech, cybersecurity and AI.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/compensation-platform-ravio-raises-12m-series-a/
