The team at Kota are pleased to share that we have raised a €5M Seed round led by our new partners, EQT Ventures, with participation from early partners Northzone and Frontline Ventures, “as well as some incredible 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 reveals their business 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, they launched their private beta and, earlier this year, “launched to the market, bringing new customers onto the Kota platform.”
Today, they’re 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.”
Partnering with EQT Ventures is helping them “to take their mission to another level. We feel incredibly lucky to have Naza and the EQT team supporting us, bringing their founder-operator backgrounds and a highly proactive, momentum-driven approach to the Kota team. This additional €5M brings the total funding to €7.6M and the support from new and existing investors gives us the opportunity to accelerate and create a new category in this industry.”
They exist to “save companies money and time so that they can more easily protect their team. We’re only at the start of this journey, but in our first few months,” their product has been having a real impact on customers:
- Teams constrained by time and cost have been able to access core benefits quickly and affordably.
- Finance departments overwhelmed by benefits and payroll reconciliation have been able to recover days per month.
- People ops teams have been able to instantly switch on coverage for their teams in multiple markets and keep benefits parity for international teams.
Their customers have been able “to onboard employees to Kota in as little as two minutes, and much to our delight, our enrolment rates have been significantly higher than the industry average, and NPS scores from employers and employees are even better than we hoped for.”
Whilst they know it won’t last forever, they’ve yet “to lose a single customer – and they’ll be working hard to maintain this as they grow and bring our offering to more teams.”
As they progressed their platform thesis, they saw opportunities “to work with adjacent players in they space.”
They launched their developer API and embedded insurance solution “to bring the underlying infrastructure and APIs that they built for ourselves to other platforms.”
They’re enabling them to “move away from providing these benefits manually and become a distribution channel to enhance their own products.”
In powering this experience within other products, they’re “furthering bringing this industry online.”