Employee benefits startup Kota just raised $14.5m in a Series A funding round backed by investors such as Eurazeo, EQT Ventures and Northzone.
Founded in 2022, the company (formerly known as Yonder) is building the infrastructure layer for employee benefits in Europe, promising to streamline the delivery of everything from health insurance to pensions through a single unified platform.
Since launching, Kota has worked with hundreds of small and medium sized companies, helping them manage various benefits schemes. To date, the company has integrated with and offers some of Europe’s leading insurance providers, including Vitality in the UK, Irish Life Health in Ireland and Allianz Global Care internationally, among others.
As well as Eurazeo, EQT and Northzone, the company also won the backing of Frontline Ventures, 9Yards and Plug and Play. Alongside the Series A, Kota announced it had obtained authorisation from the Central Bank of Ireland, making it one of the few technology platforms to voluntarily submit to tighter regulations.
Alluding to his past encounters with poorly-managed benefits systems in previous roles, founder and CEO Luke Mackey explained how “managing benefits in email, between brokers and insurance companies [had been] completely disconnected and alien from anything else in the business”.
“It’s entirely out of date. Ultimately, no one on the team connected or engaged with them, no matter how much we invested. It’s not surprising,” he says. “Insurance benefits are delivered in clunky portals or in PDFs, which is so unenguaging compared to the financial experiences employees are used to.”
Elise Stern, a director at Eurazeo, a leading private equity and investment firm based in Paris, says: “Kota really stood out to us. With a tech-first approach, they’ve built a robust technical and financial infrastructure: deep integrations with insurers across dozens of countries, visibility across the benefits stack.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/eqt-ventures-northzone-kota-funding-round-employee-benefits/
