Yonder raises €2.6M to reimagine global benefits

Today we’re opening our private beta, announcing our pre-seed round and starting on the journey to create a new standard for global employee benefits.

Yonder is the simple and borderless way to enrol and manage your employees in local health and retirement benefits. We’re taking a complex, offline and paper-heavy category and making it delightfully simple and automated. We integrate your existing HR tools, so when you add or remove people, we automate the benefits admin. You can create local packages where allowances can be flexible and benchmarked against the market standard - what’s competitive and what’s not. Your people own their enrolment and management of their health and retirement benefits via our easy-to-use app and access some of the world’s most trusted insurers and financial institutions we’ve integrated with to provide the best possible local benefits. When people move on, they keep their benefits with them – so they can stay protected, continue to contribute and remain in control of their future.

We’ve raised €2.6M pre-seed

Today we’re announcing our €2.6M pre-seed round co-led by Northzone and Frontline to accelerate our vision to make financial benefits more accessible, global and affordable. This funding helps accelerate our product development and geographic expansion.

We are incredibly lucky to have added such an experienced list of funds, founders, operators and industry leaders to our team as investors that have already played an invaluable role in supporting us to date: Cocoa, Broadstone, Tiny VC, Uncommon Projects, Nomad Capital, Truesight Ventures, Foreword VC, former Workday CTO David Clarke, co-founder of Pointy Mark Cummins, Evervault CEO Shane Curran, Utmost CEO Annarai O’Toole, COO of Zendesk Europe Peter Lorent, co-founders of Wagesteam Portman Wills and Peter Briffett, CEO of Dogpatch Labs Patrick Walsh, along with many others.

The opportunity

Taking a step back to where this all started earlier this year, this isn’t a domain my co-founders, Patrick, Deepak, or I ever thought we would be building in. We’ve delved into consumer, fintech and B2B software, but ultimately only after being exposed to this problem as the employer and employee did we get intrigued by it. It’s so profoundly outdated for the current demographic of companies and end-users that it’s become a black box, which is the ultimate form of defensibility for incumbents. This burden for companies has been exasperated by the switch to remote work and the enablement to hire people based on who they are, not where they are. Outside of the US, there is no perfect solution to enrolling remote employees in benefits. To top it off, this industry is highly regulated, and the complexities vary from region to region – even more so in Europe.

There are certain problems that, once you realise the scale of impact, are too exciting and fulfilling not to solve.

What's next

We’re quite early on this journey but have made some great progress. We’re now a team of 9 across engineering, product, compliance and customer success. Given we are new entrants, we take a first principles approach to everything we do and attempted to work backwards from where we are now vs where the market needs to be in 5-year's time. We believe compliance is an opportunity, not a hindrance, so we’ve immediately invested in it and taken steps to become regulated. We believe in direct provider integrations, which is why we work with a small number of insurers and financial institutions who are progressive in their approach to digital solutions.

There are giant companies that have provided global corporate benefits for years successfully, and our fundamental belief is that they served a certain type of customer for a period, the landscape has vastly changed, and the customer has evolved.

We’re fortunate to have backers with deep experience in this industry in the forms of Northzone and Frontline, who have a history of backing HR and fintech successes, like Personio, Workable, Localyze, Truelayer, Wagestream, Lattice, Greenhouse and many others.

Sign-up for our private beta

We’re now opening up our private beta for companies, particularly those in the UK and Ireland looking for health or retirement benefits, for local and international staff. If you would like a demo to find out more, you can book one here.

Sign-up here