Bennie Has Completely Reimagined the Employee Benefits Experience

‍Company Overview: Bennie is the modern benefits platform that has completely reimagined the employee benefits experience for mid-sized companies by combining benefits consulting and technology for the first time. With an easy-to-use app and world class brokerage services licensed in all fifty states, Bennie is the modern, cost-effective approach that provides the best employee benefits on the market for mid-sized companies. 

Round: We participated in the Seed Extension in December 2020 led by Silverton Partners with participation from Global Founders Capital, Picus Capital and FJ Labs.

Why We Invested: Today’s increasingly complex health benefits options can be challenging to understand, navigate, and access. For employees, the process of navigating health benefits to find care – from choosing a health plan to finding the right doctor – can be confusing and stressful. Consequently, health benefits tools that help employees find the right care and coverage are especially important to garner employee satisfaction and trust.

Benefits do not work like they should because we have a system that is overly complex and not actually designed for the employee. There are thousands of carriers, administrators, vendors, and data companies all marketing to brokers, employers, and employees. The result is a user experience that is challenging for employers and employees alike. Employees have to live with their employers’ decisions and are often left to sort it out on their own when they actually need the benefits they (and their employer) are paying for. This also creates operational challenges for companies whose human resources teams are forced to deal with the endless onslaught of questions and concerns from employees.

Healthcare carriers do not have a direct salesforce; instead, they sell through brokerages. The typical brokerage experience is unacceptably suboptimal. Brokers, typically, lack knowledge of the new HR technology landscape, do not adequately serve the individual employee, deliver hollow or untailored advice, and are largely reactive rather than proactive. As employer health benefits are one of the primary ways that Americans access healthcare, a solution to this difficult situation is now available. Bennie is a full-service employee benefits broker that is making it possible for companies to consistently deliver excellent benefits experiences.

Bennie has completely reimagined the employee benefits experience for mid-sized companies by combining benefits consulting and technology for the first time. With an easy-to-use app and world class brokerage services licensed in all 50 states, Bennie is the modern, cost-effective approach that provides the best employee benefits on the market. The company’s goal is to simplify the process so that employees understand, access and utilize their benefits. Employees have access to their plan details, insurance cards, account balances and a health concierge service, all within one application.

Built to deliver employee-focused benefits experiences, Bennie is a solution to help companies create a healthier workplace. By offering strategic benefits and HR technology consulting and support, Bennie is not only bridging the gap between benefits and HR technology, but also helping employers, and their employees, navigate the complexities of the benefits marketplace and select the right products and platforms for their needs. Bennie’s simple platform is a single hub for all employee benefits, making it easy for employers to manage benefits and for employees to access them.

Bennie functions as an on-demand health care concierge. Whenever an employee has a question about their benefits, the Bennie app is there to help them get the answer they need and resolve any issues. Bennie provides mid-sized companies access to high quality benefits and provides their employees with the data and tools they need to understand and use those benefits effectively. With Ask Bennie, employees have access to healthcare experts who work for the employee – not the insurance companies. Bennie helps with enrollment, bill negotiations and mistakes, benefits questions, finding doctors and much more.

We have the utmost confidence in Matt’s ability to execute on Bennie’s vision. Matt Straz, founder and CEO of Bennie, is a four-time founder and entrepreneur with a proven track record of success who is bringing a decade’s worth of experience, expertise, and relationships in the human resources world to Bennie. Matt co-founded online media startup Pictela in 2009, which was acquired by AOL after 12 months and became ONE by AOL. A year later, Matt founded Namely, a human resources, payroll, and benefits platform. As CEO, Matt was responsible for over 400 employees and raised over $215M in venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital, Matrix Partners, and GGV Capital. While Bennie was still an idea, Matt obtained his health insurance broker license in order to learn the craft. Matt has brought his core team from Namely to help build Bennie, stacking his teammates across the business functions including engineering, finance, product, sales, and strategy. The majority of Matt’s inner circle at Bennie have worked together for over six years, including Katie Bronnenkant (2011), Chris Flores (2013), Val Gashi (2014), Greg Autuori (2015), Lanny Watkins (2015), Benjamin Koubek (2015) and Maheshan Vattekat (2015).

The company is attacking a massive and growing market ripe for disruption with a total addressable market of $11B. In the United States, there are 400,000 mid-sized companies with 20 to 1,000 employees, comprising over 34 million employees. We are immensely impressed by the business management has built to date. Management has built deep partnerships across the benefits and human resources ecosystem, including with insurance giants like Aetna and Cigna, care finders likeEden Health and One Medical, and telemedicine providers like Teladoc and MDLive. Deep and diverse partnerships across the healthcare world will help market Bennie as an attractive product with an “anything and everything” platform for all employees.