Kota closes €5m seed round
Kota, formerly known as Yonder, has 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.
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.
The start-up 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 $42.1 billion 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.
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 former country manager at mobility giant Bolt Luke Mackey, former CTO at Bamboo Patrick O’Boyle, and Deepak Baliga, who led engineering teams at unicorn Flipdish.
The company has also launched an 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.
Luke Mackey, co-founder and CEO (pictured), said: “Employee health and retirement benefits are the Achilles heel of HR and finance teams. They are managed through spreadsheets, portals and e-mail – 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.”
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