Kota raise €5M Seed led by EQT Ventures

We’re excited to share that we have raised a €5M Seed round led by our new partners, EQT Ventures, with participation from our 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.

Our progress this year

We founded Kota 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, we launched our private beta and, earlier this year, launched to the market, bringing new customers onto the Kota platform. Today, we’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 us to take our 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.

Simply put, we 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, our 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. 

Our 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 we know it won’t last forever, we’ve yet to lose a single customer - and we’ll be working hard to maintain this as we grow and bring our offering to more teams. 

As we progressed our platform thesis, we saw opportunities to work with adjacent players in our space. We launched our developer API and embedded insurance solution to bring the underlying infrastructure and APIs that we built for ourselves to other platforms. We’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, we’re furthering bringing this industry online.

What's next

While funding is a milestone and more validation of our hypothesis, we know it’s a means to an end. We’re staying focused on building the best product for our customers while expanding our market availability and the coverage options. 

A big thank you to our amazing team and our investors – namely Naza at EQT, Deepka at Northzone and Zoe at Frontline, for being great partners. We look forward to building together over the next decade.

Finally, we want to say thank you to our incredible customers for joining us on this journey and for trusting us with such an important part of your team's well-being – we’re working every day to ensure we’re building the best option on the market.