Dublin-based Kota raises €5m to enable employers to cover employees’ benefits

Kota, an all-in-one platform to automate insurance and retirement benefits for modern teams, has raised €5 million Seed round led by new partners, EQT Ventures, with participation from our early partners Northzone and Frontline Ventures, as well as new angels including Job van der Voort of Remote, Romain Huet of Open AI (formerly of Stripe), David Clarke formerly of Workday and many others.

Kota was founded last year with a mission to increase access to traditional financial and insurance products for a new generation of employers and employees. At the end of 2022, Kota launched its private beta and earlier this year, launched to the market, bringing new customers onto the Kota platform. Today, Kota is covering employees in over 30 countries, have integrations into world-leading health insurance, life insurance and pension providers such as Irish Life, Allianz, Smart Pension, and have people-first companies like &Open, Spotlight Oral Care, Unmind, Fonoa and many others trusting Kota to cover their teams. 

Luke Mackey, Co-founder and CEO, Kota: ''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.'' 

Partnering with EQT Ventures is helping Kota to take its mission to another level. The startup feels incredibly lucky to have Naza and the EQT team, bringing their founder-operator backgrounds and a highly proactive, momentum-driven approach to the Kota team. This additional €5 million brings the total funding to €7.6 million and the support from new and existing investors Kota us the opportunity to accelerate and create a new category in this industry.

Kota customers have been able to onboard employees in as little as two minutes, and much to the delight, the enrolment rates have been significantly higher than the industry average, and NPS scores from employers and employees are even better than hoped for.  

Naza Metghalchi, Principal, EQT Ventures: ''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. 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.''

www.kota.io