Yonder raises €2.6m in pre-seed funding round

Irish-founded platform Yonder has raised $2.6 million (€2.6 million) in pre-seed funding to simplify health and pension benefits for global businesses and employees.

The funding round was led by Northzone and Dublin-based Frontline Ventures, with Cocoa, Broadstone, Uncommon Projects and angel investors also participating. Among the angel investors is a former Workday executive.

The funding will be used to accelerate product development, and expand its engineering and product teams, with go-to-market and commercial roles also up for recruitment. It plans to expand its existing markets in the UK and Ireland, and add new ones across Europe.

Yonder’s platform aims to remove barriers to access to benefits on a global scale, making it simple for businesses to provide benefits, such as health insurance and pensions, regardless of where employees are based. Employers can create packages quickly and easily, while employees can use it to secure local health and retirement benefits, through a mobile app to enrol and manage benefits from local providers in real time. Founded in 2022 by chief executive Luke Mackey, chief technology officer Patrick O’Boyle and director of engineering Deepak Baliga, Yonder already has a number of partnerships with insurance and investment providers that offer health, dental, vision and pensions.

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Experience of struggling

Mr Mackey said the idea for the company came from his and his co-founders’ experience of struggling with the employee benefits system. That includes fragmented and non-interoperable systems, with third-party forms often required.

“Everything that’s involved in the pension and health insurance side, or the financial stack, is really kind of offline and poor,” he said. “It is one area of finance that just has not been updated for not only my generation, but even the generation gone by; it’s quite an antiquated industry.”

However, in a hybrid work environment where employees can be scattered around the country and further afield, Yonder’s co-founders believe they have a good solution for the industry.

“In an increasingly ‘hire from anywhere’ world, flexibility is king. To stay competitive, businesses must be able to offer seamless access to a range of core employee benefits,” said Zoe Chambers, partner at Frontline Ventures. “From health to pensions, Yonder is revolutionising this process, empowering employers to provide a mobile-first, portable employee benefits experience that’s directly linked to payroll.”

The platform is currently opening its beta to companies on the waitlist. It also plans to integrate current tools such as Personio, Humaans or BambooHR to sync with the platform.