Luke Mackey, Kota
Kota, an insurtech start-up building a platform for companies to manage employee benefits, has raised €5 million ($5.2 million) in seed funding.
The Irish start-up, which recently changed its name from , will invest the funds in its go-to-market strategy for Europe. It is currently active in the UK and Ireland where it has signed up several customers and partners.
The seed round was led by EQT Ventures with participation from Northzone and Frontline Ventures alongside angel investors Job Van Der Voort of Remote.com and Romain Huet of OpenAI.
Kota has developed a platform for businesses to manage benefits and insurance cover for employees and an API for customers to embed health insurance services into their own platforms.
"We realised there's a whole ecosystem of platforms and tech platforms like HR tools, finance tools who want to or are currently trying to do benefits within their solution and it tends to be offline and manual under the hood," Kota chief executive Luke Mackey said of the markets it serves.
The start-up began rolling out its product last year and can cover 30 countries in Europe. It targets small to midsize companies that do not have the resources and infrastructure in-house to digitise the benefits experience. It also targets customers with remote teams spread out in different places with varying insurance terms and expectations.
Now the company is shifting more of its focus to sales and go-to-market functions after building its platform and API.
"We've just hired our first sales and operations people, so we've hired two people on my side of the team, which was really needed because I was taking on a lot," Mackey said. The start-up has more than doubled its staff to 19 people over the last year.
"We've definitely seen product-problem-solution fit," he said. "We're now in a place that we're pretty confident that we can start investing more in the sales side."
Kota was co-founded by Mackey, a former country manager at Bolt, along with Patrick O’Boyle and Deepak Baliga.
The start-up previously raised $2.6 million in a pre-seed round last year. EQT Ventures is a new investor in the start-up on this occasion.
"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," Naza Metghalchi, principal at EQT Ventures, said.
Kota’s approach can simplify a lot of these processes, she said, especially in the case of remote employees.
"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."