Benefits are one of the crucial employee offerings at any workplace, right from a startup to a billion-dollar company. Employee benefits are essential to boost recruitment, retaining talents, and have a competitive advantage over others. Notably, it is a productivity hack to keep a healthier and happier workforce.
However, choosing a benefit for the employees can be tricky for the majority of startups. Here’s where Cobee, a Spanish company, starts to matter. The startup develops an online platform that automates and simplifies employee benefits management.
Funding & investors
Recently, Cobee raised €14M funding in a Series A round led by European venture capital firm Balderton Capital. Other investors, including SpeedInvest, Target Global, Encomenda, and Lanai, as well as angels from Zalando, N26, Uber, and Gympass, also participated.
Borja Aranguren, Co-founder and CEO of Cobee, said: “Attracting great talent isn’t just about offering a competitive salary, employees are increasingly interested in workplace benefits too. We’ve built Cobee to provide the best possible experience for employees, giving them more access and control over their compensation and empowering them to use these critical benefits. We’re delighted to have the support of Balderton Capital and will use the funding to continue to invest in our platform and help HR teams across Europe improve staff loyalty and attract the very best talent.”
This funding round comes over a year after raising €2.1M from Speedinvest and Target Global.
About Balderton Capital
Balderton Capital is a venture firm focused exclusively on backing the best European-founded technology companies. So far, the VC has backed hundreds of European founders, and raised over $4B across nine funds. Some of the previously exited investments are Betfair, Darktrace, Nutmeg, and others.
Balderton’s current portfolio includes Revolut, Truecaller, VanMoof, Carwow, Citymapper, Contentful, ComplyAdvantage, GoCardless, Graphcore, Healx, Infarm, Kobalt Music, and others.
Suranga Chandratillake, General Partner at Balderton Capital, says: “Employees are the most important resource for companies today, so ensuring that they are happy and engaged results in higher retention rates. Providing them with a rich, easily accessible, and reportable array of benefits that they can use every day is key for anyone looking to acquire and retain great talent. Cobee makes this possible and offers more benefits, in more territories, than any other next-generation platform today.”
Fund utilisation
The Madrid-based company will use the funding to enhance its user experience for customers and their teams. The company is also planning to integrate new benefits with a focus on financial products and services, as well as well-being perks.
Cobee aims to serve more customers across Europe, who are looking for ways to offer bespoke and personalised compensation packages to their employees.
Improving employee wellbeing
Founded by Borja Aranguren, Daniel Olea, and Nacho Travesí in 2018, Cobee is on a mission to improve employee wellbeing. The platform brings a wide range of benefits for staff from gyms, to insurance products, perks, and vouchers, all in one app.
Notably, staff can redeem these benefits through a Cobee card, allowing them to track the monetary benefit they receive, as well as improving engagement rates and employee satisfaction.
The company eliminate intermediaries and external suppliers of each of the benefits, thus reducing costs and improve service quality for companies and employees,
Right now, Cobee works with various companies in its home market of Spain as well as Portugal where it expanded this January. The companies like Glovo, Petronas, Avis, and Tripadvisor are all now using Cobee to manage employee benefits and improve wellbeing.
Cobee operates in France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, and Portugal as of today. The app is free to download and available on both Android and iOS platforms.
