Employee benefits platform Ben has raised £13 million in a Series A investment round.
The London company said the funding, led by Atomico, will allow it to ‘move even faster in making benefits work for everyone, everywhere’.
Existing investors Cherry Ventures, Seedcamp and DN Capital participated in the round.
Ben, founded by Sebastian Fallert and David Duckworth, is described as the first true all-in-one platform to manage global, flexible employee benefits. It employs 35 people in London and Berlin.
During his time as UK MD at travel company Secret Escapes, Fallert realised there was no off-the-shelf platform available to create a great benefits programme; rather, it was a manual, time-consuming and expensive process.
Duckworth, meanwhile, previously worked for large banks such as HSBC where he picked up a taste for payments infrastructure.
“People teams all over the world spend a lot of time figuring out what to offer to their teams, sourcing benefits, and drowning in administration including data exchange with providers, answering employee questions, payments, tax, and compliance,” the founders wrote in a blog post.
“The worst bit? A lot of effort and money ends up spent on benefits that don’t matter to employees.”
Companies can move all of their existing benefits – including pension, health and life insurance – into Ben, as well as any budgets for health & wellbeing, learning & development and working from home.
Employees then get to make choices based on what matters to them – allocating budget and configuring their own insurance coverage, pension, and choosing from hundreds of additional benefits across mental, physical, social, and financial wellbeing even using their own Ben Benefits Mastercard that can turn anything into a benefit.
“There are so many benefits products coming to market from new insurance products to mental health, fertility, parenthood support, financial advice, and retirement just to name a few,” continued the founders.
“But we believe complexity limits innovation in the ecosystem and there should be so much more to support every employee based on what they need most right now. Ben’s open software platform combined with payment infrastructure has been built from the ground up to become the first central place to connect benefits suppliers, insurers, and brokers with companies and their employees.”