Exclusive: AI-powered benefits platform Origin raises $30 million in fresh funding to bring CHROs visibility into benefits usage and spend

Origin, a London-based startup building an AI-powered platform to help multinational companies manage their employee benefits, has raised $30 million in new venture capital funding.

The funding, which the company is calling an extended Series A+ round, brings the total amount of money Origin has raised in the past 12 months to more than $50 million.

The latest investment is being led by Notion Capital, which also participated in Origin’s initial Series A. Felix Capital, which led the earlier round, Acadian Ventures, and all other existing investors are also participating, the company said. It also said that it had secured “additional growth funding” from HSBC Innovation Banking U.K. alongside the new venture round.

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Origin’s angel investors include Paul Daugherty, the former chief technology and innovation officer of Accenture; Jacqui Canney, the chief people and AI enablement officer at ServiceNow; and Tudor Havriliuc, the former vice president of human resources at Meta, who held the role from 2010 to 2022.

The company declined to provide its valuation following the latest funding, but said it was higher valuation than its valuation following the initial Series A.

Origin was founded by Chris Bruce and Pete Craghill, the leadership team behind Darwin, a benefits technology software company, originally called Thomsons Online Benefits, that was acquired by Mercer in 2016. At the time of its acquisition, Darwin held an 80% market share of the non-U.S. global benefits administration market, according to Bruce.

Bruce told Fortune that the idea for Origin came out of a discussion he had with Craghill in the summer of 2023 in which they both observed how advances in AI and large language models could now address a problem they had tried and failed to fully solve 15 years earlier: giving big companies a clear picture of what they spend on employee benefits globally.

“It simply was not possible without AI,” Bruce said.

For most organizations, benefits are their second-largest cost, but they lack visibility into what they are spending. Bruce said one client’s chief financial officer told him the company believed it was spending roughly $750 million on benefits but had no way to verify that figure. “I’ve got visibility on every budget line in the organization, with the exception of benefits,” Bruce recalled the CFO saying.

The root of the problem, Craghill said, is that benefits data in multinational organizations is scattered across PDFs, insurance policies, vendor platforms, and local documents in dozens of languages. “You had all this unstructured data around the world, and there was no solution to it,” Craghill said. “It was always a human problem.” He said Origin spent its first 18 months focused on cracking the data ingestion challenge, learning how to assess the quality and completeness of wildly inconsistent source materials.

Origin’s platform, powered by an AI engine the company calls Cuido, ingests and structures that fragmented data—from policies, contracts, renewals, broker reports, and vendor platforms—into a single, queryable system of record. Using the platform, HR executives can track benefit spending and usage, as well as handling renewals, policy reviews, and governance workflows.

Employees can also query Origin’s platform to ask questions about what benefits they have available to them. In multinational companies with complex benefits offerings in different geographies, getting an answer to this seemingly simple question can often take days. Now, it takes just minutes.

While that is good for employees, the real payoff for using Origin’s platform is that it helps companies rationalize their benefits spending, reducing duplication, or helping them consolidate providers, according to Bruce. The company whose CFO estimated he was spending $750 million annually on benefits, now expects to save around $75 million by using Origin’s platform, Bruce said. Another of Origin’s clients consolidated 13 local insurance policies into a single regional plan, achieving a 20% cost saving, according to the company.

Origin’s Cuido platform was co-created in partnership with several large multinational employers who serve as Origin’s anchor customers, including Pfizer, Comcast, and BP. Bruce said the company went out to 11 major multinationals two years ago, shared its vision, and asked them to sign on as paying co-creators. Seven of those 11 agreed. A large technology company that initially declined in order to build a similar system internally ended up joining Origin 10 months later after abandoning its own effort, Bruce said.

Origin currently has about 75 employees and go-to-market teams in both the United States and the United Kingdom and Europe. The company uses what Bruce calls “a value-based pricing model” that is tied to the complexity of a client’s organization, including the number of countries in which it operates.

Origin’s new funding will be used to deepen integrations into