Cobee, the Spanish startup that is revolutionising employee benefit management, has closed a Pre-Series A round valued at 2.1 million euros. The round was led by international investment firms Speedinvest, and Target Global. Other backers include Chris Bouwer (co-founder of Adyen) and existing investors Encomenda Smart Capital, Sabadell VC (Banco Sabadell), Lanai Partners and Abac Nest.
The fresh capital arrives following a highly successful year in which Cobee has managed to position itself as a key player in the field of Human Resources Management. 2019 saw Cobee beat off competition from 750 companies worldwide to become overall winner of the BBVA Open Talent 2019 , the world's biggest fintech startup competition .
Founded in 2018 by Borja Aranguren and Daniel Olea, Cobee has proven its platform to be innovative, effective, and market-disrupting, leading to adoption by companies like Petronas, Opinno, Glovo, Avis Budget Group, Gympass, and Willis Towers Watson. Cobee’s digital platform enables employees to leverage better economic performance from their salary, offering them a tool to autonomously manage their compensations or benefits.
At the same time, organisations obtain average percentages of 70% adhesion to these programmes (compared with an average of about 15/30% achieved by conventional providers), while reducing their management burden thanks to digitisation and automation of all the processes.
With the new funding, and new renowned European fintech investors on board, Cobee can scale up its business model in Spain and expand into international markets. To support its mission of becoming a European category leader, the company plans to strengthen its team and enhance its platform by integrating new products and benefits.
“Not only is compensation and benefits a buoyant market, but at Cobee we have a competitive advantage of being the first startup in Europe to digitize all processes for automated, customized employee benefits management. Our investors’ confidence reinforces our expectations of success, encouraging us to accelerate our plans and make
2020 a decisive year for our business”, states Borja Aranguren, co-founder and CEO of Cobee .
Moreover, Stefan Klestil, Partner at Speedinvest and early investor in WeFox and other successful fintech companies adds: "Digitisation and automation in the benefits management space is long overdue. The simplicity of Cobee's solution and their platform-centric approach opens up a huge market opportunity to reinvent how benefits are disbursed and consumed across Europe (and beyond). We are excited to be backing Borja, Daniel and the team to build on the fantastic momentum they have received and take the company to the next level.”
Dr Ricardo Schäfer, Partner at Target Global’s Early Stage Fund II and investor in some of Europe‘s leading Fintech businesses,says: “We have been very impressed with Cobee’s employee centric benefits solution which offers a unique and user friendly value proposition and we are excited to partner with Cobee on their journey to become Europe’s leading employee benefits management provider.”
About Cobee
Cobee is the first European digital platform that allows management of employee benefits in a simple, effective, fully automated way. With Cobee, organisations have a simple system to offer different benefits and products to their employees (meals, transport, nursery, medical insurance, etc.). All this is without having to manage different providers and without major administrative tasks.
On their part, the employees are empowered to control and manage their compensation and benefits in a highly flexible, comfortable manner through their Smartphones. The startup, founded in 2018, was the winner of the BBVA Open Talent 2019 global competition, and of the CNP Start 2019 programme by CNP Partners.
About Speedinvest
Speedinvest is a European venture capital fund with €320M AUM and offices in London, Berlin, Vienna, Munich and San Francisco. Employing a sector-focused investment structure, we fund innovative early-stage technology startups in the areas of Fintech, Health Tech, Consumer Tech, Network Effects, Deep Tech and Industrial Tech. Speedinvest actively deploys its global network and dedicated team of more than 20, in-house operational experts to support our 140+ portfolio companies, including with US market expansion. Learn more: www.speedinvest.com .
About Target Global
Target Global is an international investment firm headquartered in Berlin, with €700m in assets under management. With offices in London, Tel Aviv and Barcelona, we connect the key European startup ecosystems and leverage the unique DNA of each of our target geographies, across our global network. Building on our experienced team with substantial operational and investment experience, we help exceptional entrepreneurs to build market leaders. Target Global invests across multiple stages, investing in fast-growing tech companies, targeting trillion € markets. Our Partners have been investing for more than 15 years in the digital technology space, backing some of the key European success stories. The Target Global portfolio includes companies such as Auto1, Delivery Hero, Omio (formerly GoEuro), TravelPerk and WeFox.More about Target Global:
https://www.targetglobal.vc /
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