Kota closes €5m seed round to help further grow business

Irish-founded platform Kota, formerly known as Yonder, has closed a €5 million seed funding round to help further its efforts to modernise the multi-billion-dollar employee benefits industry.

The company, which is aiming to simplify health and pension benefits for global businesses and employees through the use of a 100 per cent digital platform and app, is also launching a new embedded health insurance product that will allow platforms and developers to embed financial benefits products in their own platforms, increasing access.

The funding round was led by EQT Ventures, with existing investors Northzone and Frontline Ventures also participating alongside Remote.com’s Job Van Der Voort, Open AI’s Romain Huet, and former Workday executive David Clarke.

“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,” said Naza Metghalchi, Principal at EQT Ventures.

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“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.”

Kota is designed to remove barriers to access to benefits on a global scale, making it simple for businesses to provide benefits, such as health insurance and pensions, regardless of where employees are based. Employers can create packages easily, while employees can use it to secure local health and retirement benefits. People enroll through a mobile app and manage benefits from local providers in real time. It has coverage in more than 30 countries.

“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,” chief executive Luke Mackey said. “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.”

Founded in 2022 by Mr Mackey, chief technology officer Patrick O’Boyle and director of engineering Deepak Baliga, Kota already has a number of partnerships with insurance and investment providers that offer health, dental, vision and pensions benefits.

The platform works with existing tools in use in companies such as Personio, Humaans, HiBob, Bamboo HR and Workday. Kota has also integrated pension, health and life insurance providers that include Irish Life, Allianz Partners and UK-based Smart Pension, with the latter deal announced in August. Among Kota’s existing customers are &Open, Spotlight Oral Care, Unmind and Fonoa.

Last year, Kota raised $2.6 million (€2.4 million) in pre-seed funding to accelerate product development and expand its engineering and product teams.