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.

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: 

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.

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. 

Kota raise €5M Seed led by EQT Ventures

Our mission is to increase access to traditional financial and protective products for a new generation of employers and employees.

For us, ‘Yonder’ was the name that brought our mission to life. It was inspired by the things in life that are far away yet important now, like your retirement. 

Whilst our mission has remained the same, our vision has grown. We’re building the infrastructure and platform to bring health, life insurance and pension providers online across the globe - a new category that will allow modern, distributed companies to easily and more affordably access core benefits. 

When you’re building a new category, you need a name that you can own. Unfortunately for us, we weren’t the only people who loved the name Yonder. In case you hadn’t already noticed, there are a few other companies that shared the name with us.

Kota is the name we’ve chosen to bring us through the next stage of our journey. 

When we decided to change our name, we had a few non-negotiables:

For those of you who are customers, partners and friends, you might ask how this affects you, and the simple answer is it won’t. You’ll notice changes only to our name and logo across our web and mobile app. 

We are more excited than ever to create a category-defining company and improve the lives of millions of people in the coming years. Our ambition continues to grow, and our new name marks the start of a new phase of our growth as we deliver more happiness and good fortune to you - our customers, partners and friends!

We're saying goodbye to Yonder

Yonder renames as Kota

Kota, the all-in-one platform to automate health insurance and retirement benefits for growing teams, today announced it is working with Irish Life to enable companies and their Irish employees to easily administer and enrol in local health insurance and pensions.

Kota makes it effortless for businesses to provide core benefits, such as health insurance and pensions, to employees regardless of where they live. The platform is the only 100% digital way for companies to enrol and manage their employee's core benefits. We partner with insurance and investment providers globally to streamline the creation and day-to-day management of health insurance and workplace pensions for companies and their employees. By offering the flexibility to allocate per-region health budgets or pension contributions, companies can easily scale their hiring without being slowed down by benefits administration or localisation.

In Ireland, Kota will exclusively offer Irish Life health insurance and pension products to its clients. This means that companies and employees using the platform can easily access comprehensive coverage and investment options set-up in minutes. Irish Life will benefit from the additional digital channel to attract small and scaling companies. Employees can enrol and manage their health insurance and pension easily and with the flexibility to choose their own products with the Kota mobile app.

Kota's vision is to become the one-stop platform for companies' core benefits globally – taking on a fragmented and paper-heavy industry. By working with firms like Irish Life, Kota is engaging with the highest-quality providers to expand its presence in local markets while also serving a wide range of countries via international health insurance. 

 and find out why modern People and Finance teams are switching to Kota.

Irish Life and Kota Partner to Enhance Benefits for Growing Teams

Irish Life works with Yonder to make corporate benefits  more accessible to growing businesses

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yonder raises €2.6M to reimagine global benefits

Yonder raises €2.6M to reinvent global benefits

Announcing our $14.5M Series A

⚡️ Learn about our recent Series A funding round!

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