Compt nabs $10M to make employee perks more personal – TechCrunch

With white collar staff settling into hybrid work preparations — a legacy of the pandemic — corporations are rethinking how they ship company perks like transportation, cafeterias, and gymnasiums (a lot to the chagrin of some). Because the idea of “the workplace” evolves, employers are being urged to supply versatile perks that may be tailor-made to the wants of particular person staff. Fairly than complimentary laundry service, for instance, staff are rallying behind the thought of work-from-home and wellness stipends.

Loads of perk administration platforms exist, together with Cherry, Fringe, and Origin (which gives monetary planning as a perk). However Amy Spurling, the CEO of Compt, makes the case that incumbent options are overly reliant on vendor marketplaces or advantages playing cards, which restrict the methods through which staff can use their perks.

“The lacking key to concurrently streamlining the [employee perk] course of for admins and boosting worker engagement [is] personalization,” Spurling instructed TechCrunch through electronic mail. “When corporations look to help staff with personalised perk options, they’ve a alternative of vendor marketplaces, card-based fashions, and reimbursement. The purpose is to supply one thing distinctive to every worker, however vendor marketplaces and card-based fashions are inherently the other; they restrict the choices an worker has to a couple massive title corporations to spend their perk {dollars}.”

Picture Credit: Compt

She pitches Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Compt as the reply. Coming off of a $13 million Collection A led by Battery Ventures, which the corporate introduced at the moment, Compt permits groups to assign set stipends in broad classes like “well being and wellness” or “household” after which let staff choose providers in these classes that attraction to them. To get reimbursed, staff add photographs of receipts through Compt’s cell app or Slack integration.

“Compt’s reimbursement mannequin permits an worker to spend cash anyplace and on something — a neighborhood restaurant, a favourite mindfulness app, vet payments, a charity that’s near their coronary heart. The probabilities are literally countless,” Spurling stated. “Plus, by permitting personalization, more cash is being spent regionally within the communities the place folks stay … By way of personalised perk stipends with Compt, corporations are in a position to help their groups and the communities through which they stay and work.”

A path to perks

Spurling was beforehand the COO and CFO at Jana, a cell promoting firm, the place she managed HR and finance groups. Whereas there, she says she noticed the corporate attempt to implement a profitable perks program, however staff all wished various things.

“In response, HR tried to schedule an increasing number of perk distributors and monitor utilization so the finance staff might guarantee taxability. The ensuing mess was an administrative nightmare,” Spurling stated. “[I] realized the lacking key to concurrently streamlining the method for admins and boosting worker engagement was personalization.”

Compt achieves this by integrating with HR programs and payroll software program on the backend. The platform is constructed to be “IRS-compliant,” Spurling says, but in addition to help international groups — Compt presently helps corporations in all 50 U.S. states and 60 nations.

Along with fundamental perk insurance policies, Compt can ship worker bonuses and tie bonus packages to a perk stipend. For instance, corporations can reward staff on their birthdays and work anniversaries or or for hitting venture milestones and targets.

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Standing out from the group

Compt is rising quickly, Spurling says, with ambitions to increase from a 12-person staff to twenty by the top of 2022. Annual recurring income in 2021 grew 500%, and the corporate claims its gross margin profile is 97%. Compt’s complete raised stands at $16.5 million.

When requested about plans within the close to time period, Spurling says that Compt will double down on buyer acquisition — rising its go-to-market strategy. “As the way forward for work tendencies towards being extra employee-centric and fewer company-centric (an enormous profit for our enterprise mannequin), we’re nonetheless — like so many others — working to beat the outdated mind-set that staff ought to log in, sit down, and be compliant work robots,” she added.

It’s true that company perks are ripe for disruption (pardon the well-worn time period). In a 2020 worker wellbeing research lately printed by Gallup, solely 24% of staff stated that they take part in wellness packages at their corporations — and simply 12% say they assist wellbeing. In a separate worker survey, this one performed by Metlife, 61% of staff stated that getting access to rising advantages would scale back their stress whereas 52% stated it could make them extra loyal to their employer.

However, as illustrated by the $12.3 billion enterprise traders funneled in HR tech startups final yr, there’s no scarcity of sturdy competitors. Compt should show that its platform is sufficiently differentiated to face out from the crowded subject.

“There’s … extra HR tech corporations coming into the market and there might very nicely be an oversaturation of reimbursement choices, making it tough for decision-makers to find out which platform would be the greatest for really personalised perk stipends,” Spurling stated. “This defeats the aim of supporting an worker’s complete wellbeing and never simply their work wellbeing.”