Patrick O’Boyle, Luke Mackey and Deepak Baliga, Co-Founders of Kota

At EQT Ventures, we’re convinced that the modern company stack will be owned by businesses breaking down silos (AI and API-first), and modernizing old industries by connecting and abstracting legacy software and outdated manual processes.

Financial benefits such as pension or insurance are no exceptions — their distribution is heavily reliant on non tech-savvy brokers, who are power users of CSV and PDF files. This entire value chain is entirely dependent on manual inputs and missing a data synchronization and reconciliation piece.

With this in mind, we are excited to lead a €5m round into Kota — the all-in-one platform making it easy to enroll, manage and scale financial benefits anywhere in the world — starting with 30 European countries.

Kota builds connectivity with providers across the world, and is set to become the rails from which financial products are distributed and sold, in an age where employees are increasingly relying in their workplace to access them.

In backing Kota, we join our friends at Northzone and Frontline, as well as some incredible founders and operators from leading fintech and HR businesses like Personio, Workday, Stripe, Remote, and Open AI.

After meeting up with the team for over a year, we are privileged to be on the Kota journey.

Here is why:

📊 Market: It is undeniable how large the market is, but it’s also absurdly fragmented whilst being commoditised. We consistently hear about the growing pain points experienced by all actors (insurers, brokers, employers, employees). More importantly, there’s no better time to be building Kota:

* The tailwinds of cross-border work since the pandemic have shed light on the complexity of benefits

* Financial providers’ cost to serve keeps growing, eating into their operating margins. This has made reducing operation overhead a priority

* In the fight to become the HR superapp, many companies need to be “all-in-one” — Kota enables this by being the interoperable middle layer for them to facilitate benefits digitally (a technically and regulatory-heavy category that super apps don’t like to play in).

🌎 New category creation with a winner takes most/all dynamic: this middle layer positioning in the value chain is highly strategic as it allows Kota to have the lowest cost to serve, automate the transfer of data between different stakeholders in multiple directions, and be in the flow of money. Their approach is both a platform play (allow other platforms to build on top of their API, and embed insurance), but also direct (allow corporates to offer global benefits in just a few clicks).

🧑🏽‍🤝‍🧑🏽 Behind all this sits a driven and execution-minded team led by Luke, Patrick and Deepak — who have witnessed scale in unicorns businesses like Bolt and Flipdish. In fact, their shipping velocity was one of the reasons that led us to accelerate conversations with them. We’re impressed by their ability to lay solid foundations for the business in terms of deep engagement as well as their alignment with their financial partners, helping them lock up the supply. The very true definition of “killers with hearts” as would say my friend Carmen from Cocoa.

At EQT, we are strong believers in companies building infrastructure in fintechs such as Banking Circle (payment), Mambu (banking), and Cytora (insurance). With today’s announcement, we’re excited to add Kota to this group of relentless founders building generation-defining companies.