Irish-founded insurance benefits platform Kota, formerly known as Yonder, has raised $14.5 million (€12.8 million) in funding to bring globally accessible and frictionless employment benefits for employees
That brings the total funding raised by the company to $22.9 million over three rounds.
The new Series A round was led by Eurazeo, with existing investors EQT Ventures, Northzone and Frontline Ventures taking part. New investors 9Yards and Plug and Play also contributed to the round.
“Kota really stood out to us,” said Eurazeo’s Elise Stern. “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, and a seamless API that allows partners – from HRIS to payroll – to embed benefits natively.”
Kota will use the funding to expand its reach into more markets, increase the variety of insurance carrier partners in its products, and also grow its team.
“We’re pretty ambitious. Our team is mainly made-up of engineers and specialists in things like some insurance and compliance. So we’re doubling down there,” said CEO Luke Mackey.
“Where we invested a lot is making sure that we built the best engineering and product teams, best integrations teams and building great relationships with insurance companies. We have a small sales team in Dublin, we’ve expanded that team into the UK now. We have offices in Dublin and London, and we’re hiring.”
Kota is aiming to simplify health and pension benefits for global businesses and employees.
“Europe is exceptionally complex when it comes to insurance and that obviously feeds into benefits and the providers remain very fragmented country to country,” Mr Mackey said.
“The regulators are different. That just creates a lot of complexity, creates a lot of costs. That means that brokers are still the route into [the] market for small companies.
“What we’re trying to do is build that underlying infrastructure, bring the insurance companies more online and make them easy and accessible in a very user-friendly way.”
The company has also obtained its Central Bank of Ireland authorisation, with Mr Mackey saying it allowed the company to scale outside of Ireland, and passport across 30 European countries.
The company is also expecting a boost from pension autoenrolment, which is due to begin next year.
Founded in 2022 by Mr Mackey, chief technology officer Patrick O’Boyle and director of engineering Deepak Baliga, Kota began offering its services in 2023, and has since facilitated access to employee benefits for hundreds of small and medium sized companies.
