Life Scientific is a fast-growing Irish crop-protection company with around 110 employees across Ireland, the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Canada and the US. Their benefits offering had grown organically over time, leaving their lean People team managing multiple providers, inconsistent processes and a heavy manual workload.

The introduction of Ireland’s new Auto-Enrolment system - requiring employer pension contributions from an employee’s first day - created the perfect moment for a full reset.

Irish Auto-Enrolment exposed compliance gaps

Life Scientific’s existing pension setup only provided employer contributions after 12 months of service. Under Auto-Enrolment, that would no longer be compliant. Without restructuring, they risked a messy rollout, having employees enrolled into the government scheme alongside their private scheme.

A more scalable approach to UK pension benefits & Auto-Enrolment process

No occupational pension scheme existed in the UK, which meant they were managing contributions on an individual level, via private pension schemes. This meant that there was added administration for every new joiner in the UK so as they continued to grow, they needed a viable, scalable option that was compliant with the UK Auto-Enrolment process. 

A fragmented benefits ecosystem created unnecessary complexity

Across Ireland and the UK, benefits lived in different places, with different providers for each which caused a significant administration burden for the People and Finance teams. Tracking everything meant spreadsheets, emails, duplicated data and constant provider chasing - all managed by one person.

Benefits weren’t landing with employees

Internal reviews highlighted that 3× salary life cover was below market and that employees needed clearer guidance on their benefits package. Staff weren’t sure how to choose pension funds, where their benefits lived or who to contact - forcing frequent, technical questions onto an already-stretched People team.

Kota’s platform allows for minimum contributions for all employees to keep everyone in the same occupational scheme, automated enrolments for new joiners that are synced to your HRIS, and an employee app that keeps employees engaged with retirement savings.

Kota brought the full Irish and UK benefits footprint together into one simple platform: Pension, Life assurance, Income protection, Health insurance, and UK pension. All synced to their HRIS, Personio.

Automation replaced manual enrolments, compliance tracking, provider follow-ups, payroll reconciliation, employee fund guidance, and more.

Life Scientific didn’t just get software, they got extensive strategic support from Kota’s Benefits team on:

For employees: Clear, consistent communications, guided onboarding, and simple explanations of pension funds helped them feel confident, not confused.

Over €17,000 saved in admin time and error reduction - calculated by Life Scientific’s team

Life Scientific calculated a saving of more than €17k simply through:

Fully Auto-Enrolment-ready with months to spare

Employer contributions now start on day one, ensuring compliance ahead of legislation and removing the need for a second PRSA scheme.

UK Auto-Enrolment stabilised and audit-ready

Manual fixes and mass administration are gone - replaced with reliable, automated workflows.

One benefits ecosystem across Ireland and the UK

Employees now see one platform, one process and one set of communications - with far less complexity behind the scenes.

Life cover increased from 3× → 4× salary

A meaningful upgrade to the organisation’s protection benefits, delivered at matched cost.

If the start of this story sounds painfully familiar, let’s chat about getting you to the end

Auto-Enrolment is reshaping how benefits are done in Ireland. For many companies, it’s the ideal moment to fix legacy issues, consolidate providers and reduce admin across regions.

Kota helps organisations like Life Scientific move from fragmented, manual processes to a single, automated benefits engine.

 to see how Kota can do the same for you.

Life Scientific

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How Life Scientific simplified benefits and saved €17k worth of admin time

 is a startup hub, located in the heart of Dublin’s Digital Docklands. By providing a platform for entrepreneurship and innovation, its mission is to accelerate the development of Ireland’s startup ecosystem. A team of 50 passionate “do-ers” who share a profound dedication not only to its mission, but also to one another.

So needless to say, this team is diverse, driven, and determined to deliver for their clients. Dogpatch is Ireland’s most connected startup and innovation hub. Recognised as one of the world’s top incubators, their core mission is to accelerate the development of Ireland’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and ensure that great startups can start locally, but grow globally.

Community is at the heart of Dogpatch Labs ethos

When speaking with Jenny, a word that came up time and time again was: meaningful. Dogpatch truly live its own ethos, so while building a community for startups, the team knew how important it was to cultivate a positive & inclusive environment for their own team.

So what could Dogpatch offer its employees that was meaningful? What felt important to people? While it also provides security for their team members, offering benefits acts as a marker for the team, a sense of achievement that they can provide more to their employees, having began their journey as a small startup just a few years ago.

Dogpatch has seen what works, and what doesn't work for teams given its extensive involvement with over 500+ community members and multiple startup programme cohorts. It knows that investing in employees long term requires more than a short-term fix. People need to feel supported and able to do their job when they need to, without worrying about the 'what if's' of healthcare and the 'what next' of retirement funds.

Giving staff members peace of mind is not only important personally, but it also allows people to bring their best self to work every day.

Managing hundreds of other companies whilst trying to scale within your own company is no easy feat. Along with the obvious expense of getting healthcare and pension set up for your team, time was a big blocker for Dogpatch Labs. So here's how we helped:

Having launched health benefits with Dogpatch, we're excited to continue supporting and working with Dogpatch - a company that supports startups from the ground up.

Just like how we work with Dogpatch Labs, we want to provide our customers with a service that just isn't out there right now. We want you to feel like you can provide healthcare and retirement products to your team at a fraction of the usual cost. We want you to feel like you can understand exactly what you're buying and what you're being charged so you can make the best decisions for your team. And finally we want you to feel like you have us to talk to at every step of the way - we're here to help and guide you through. Want to chat? Get in touch with us 

Dogpatch Labs

How Kota helped Dogpatch Labs save countless hours on benefits headaches

nineDots is a specialist tech recruiter. Since starting in 2017, they’ve always done things a little differently. They are big on transparency, building great relationships, and cutting out the BS that can come with normal recruitment processes.

In keeping with this people-centric approach, they wanted to provide their team with really strong core benefits.

Providing healthcare and pensions for the team had been on Aisling’s to-do list for a long time, but the friction involved in going through traditional brokers made it seem impossible. Nothing was quite right for what nineDots needed.

Aisling was looking for something easy to use, and cost effective to give excellent care to staff, without the hassle.

Kota has helped Aisling to provide the nineDots team with health and pension benefits. While it was quick and easy to set up, the boost to employee morale has been significant and long-lasting. 

Aisling loves that whether staff want to use the benefits or not, they know that nineDots is investing in them. This contributes to their culture of mutual trust and support- a key reason people love to work at nineDots.

Much like nineDots' own ethos, they wanted to cut through the industry BS with pensions and healthcare. Aisling wanted Kota to provide a product and service that didn't include any confusing jargon or hidden fees. They wanted guaranteed support at every step without feeling rushed or like they didn't understand the process.

And there you have it. nineDots are now 6 months into their journey with Kota, and we are delighted to have a happy employer with satisfied employees as our customers. Thanks nineDots, and thanks Aisling!

Just like how we work with nineDots, we want to provide our customers with a service that just isn't out there right now. We want you to feel like you can provide healthcare and retirement products to your team at a fraction of the usual cost. We want you to feel like you can understand exactly what you're buying, and what you're being charged, so you can make the best decisions for your team. And finally, we want you to feel like you have us to talk to at every step of the way - we're here to help and guide you through. Want to chat? Get in touch with us 

&open

Cloudsmith

nineDots

How nineDots uses Kota to power and scale their teams core benefits

&Open are on a mission to fix corporate gifting. They know that lasting relationships aren’t built on wasteful freebies. People need to know they matter. Their team understands that a carefully-selected gift, given at just the right time, has the power to take a relationship beyond the transactional.

At Kota, we feel the same way about providing benefits to employees. Employees need to know they matter. Offering the right benefits to your employees, and articulating the value of that clearly, creates meaningful trust.

Financial wellbeing at the heart of the offering 

&Open’s team were looking for something their employees would actually utilise. They had gotten feedback from their employees that many of their young team didn’t enjoy going back and forth on confusing plans with traditional brokers. They also knew that if the onboarding and set up was cumbersome, their employees simply wouldn’t engage. With Kota, the &Open team are now setting up their future financial position in a stress-free way. 

Benefits management and payroll with many companies straddles both HR and Finance teams. With Kota, the finance team can easily run payroll, and pay all of their vendor invoices each month, giving back time that is usually spent reconciling data. 

Driving engagement  through an excellent UI 

When it comes to benefits management, traditionally speaking, user experience for both the HR and Finance departments as well as employees has traditionally been poor. &Open, being a series A company, wanted something they could scale up with quickly, while always keeping employees engaged, making Kota the obvious choice. 

How Kota helped &Open reimagine employee benefits and automate away finance tasks

&Open

Swan

Cloudsmith is a cloud-native, global, universal artefact management platform for securely developing and distributing software. Founded in 2016, Cloudsmith is on a mission to build the world's single source of truth for all software. Backed by institutional investors like Tiger Global, they are rapidly replacing legacy competitors in the market, and helping customers prepare for the next decade of scalability and success.

As the team grew from country to country, they had initially engaged with Employers of Record to ease the workload of entering new markets. However, as the team scaled in various regions, they outgrew this solution, finding it costly and time consuming, particularly from a benefits management perspective.

Chief of Staff, Lauren Seawright, alluded to the fact that 

“trying to juggle teams across different jurisdictions, can be challenging.  You want to be fair and offer everyone similar employee benefits, no matter where they work.” 

For Lauren, the ability to easily set up and manage core benefits in new regions was paramount. This is where Kota came in.

Shifting the feeling towards benefit management

When it came to managing benefits in Cloudsmith, the feeling was that wherever they set up benefits, be that directly with providers or with brokers, the process for both HR and Finance was clunky, dealing with employee queries to navigate payments to providers has always been a struggle.

With Kota, Cloudsmith’s teams can easily enrol, account for and report on all of their employee benefits coherently. They now manage their benefits in a manner consistent with how the rest of their HR and Finance tasks are run. Efficiently.

At the end of the day, benefits are only worthwhile if your employees truly value them. Cloudsmith’s employee enrolment uptake has been a swift success. The feedback on Kota, the vehicle through which they now manage all of their benefits, has been fantastic.

How Cloudsmith scaled employee benefits with Kota

 is an AI Virtual Fitting Room for fashion eCommerce. It allows shoppers can get the right size and enables brands can sell efficiently online. Swan wants to allow people to look great in the clothes that they buy online without any of the hassle.

On a wider level, a product like Swan has a direct effect on the environmental impact made by online shoppers too. More accurate sizing means less returns, less returns means less clothing being sent unnecessarily to landfills. Lovely.

Swan is a true success story, having started as a research team and transitioned into a company in 2022 to help customers sell efficiently online. So at this early stage, why were benefits so important to Swan? They needed the right people, with the right skill, in order to grow.

Hiring the best in class requires more than a salary.

Eoin was looking to make some key early hires at Swan, and as a startup, getting the right people in is pivotal to success. Eoin saw benefits as an effective way to extend great employment offers to top talent - something past a transactional salary that proves the company cares about you. Creating the right culture around the team and giving them an environment where they can show up and do their best was front of mind.

When you're building a startup, two things that are monitored closely are time and money. Eoin wanted to make the best decisions for his staff members with these factors in mind for the sake of the business.

So when Eoin realised that Kota could save him a lot of time and he could offer his staff excellent benefits for far less money than a traditional route - his head was turned.

Along with the obvious impact that saving time and money had on Eoin, the final piece of the puzzle was ensuring his people were happy with it.

Swan’s team have had some key highlights:

We've now been working with the team at Swan for almost a year, and we're excited to support them as they scale from strength to strength. 

, we want to provide our customers with a service that just isn't out there right now. We want you to feel like you can provide healthcare and retirement products to your team at a fraction of the usual cost. We want you to feel like you can understand exactly what you're buying, and what you're being charged, so you can make the best decisions for your team. And finally, we want you to feel like you have us to talk to at every step of the way - we're here to help and guide you through. Want to chat? Get in touch with us 

How Life Scientific simplified benefits and saved €17k worth of admin time

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