AI-Powered Benefits Platform Origin Secures $30 Million to Enhance Visibility and Spend Management for CHROs

(SeaPRwire) –   Origin, a London-based startup that has developed an AI-driven platform to assist multinational corporations in managing employee benefits, has secured $30 million in fresh venture capital funding.

The investment, which the company is designating an extended Series A+ round, increases the total capital Origin has raised over the past 12 months to over $50 million.

Notion Capital is leading the latest investment, having also taken part in Origin’s original Series A. Felix Capital, which spearheaded the previous round, Acadian Ventures, and all other prior investors are also taking part, the company stated. It additionally announced it had obtained “additional growth funding” from HSBC Innovation Banking U.K. in conjunction with the new venture round.

Among Origin’s angel investors are Paul Daugherty, previously chief technology and innovation officer at Accenture; Jacqui Canney, chief people and AI enablement officer at ServiceNow; and Tudor Havriliuc, former vice president of human resources at Meta, who served in that position from 2010 to 2022.

The company did not disclose its valuation after the latest funding, but confirmed it exceeded the valuation from its initial Series A.

The company was founded by Chris Bruce and Pete Craghill, who previously led Darwin, a benefits technology software firm originally known as Thomsons Online Benefits, which Mercer acquired in 2016. According to Bruce, Darwin commanded an 80% market share of the non-U.S. global benefits administration market at the time of its acquisition.

Bruce told that the concept for Origin emerged from a conversation with Craghill in the summer of 2023, when they both recognized how progress in AI and large language models could finally solve a problem they had attempted but been unable to fully address 15 years earlier: providing large corporations with clear visibility into their global employee benefits spending.

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

For most organizations, employee benefits represent their second-biggest expense, yet they have limited visibility into their actual spending. Bruce noted that one client’s chief financial officer told him the company believed it was spending approximately $750 million on benefits but could not verify that number. “I’ve got visibility on every budget line in the organization, with the exception of benefits,” Bruce recalled the CFO saying.

According to Craghill, the core issue is that benefits information in multinational organizations is dispersed among 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 explained that Origin dedicated its first 18 months to solving the data ingestion problem, learning to evaluate the quality and completeness of highly inconsistent source materials.

Origin’s platform, driven by its AI engine, Cuido, absorbs and organizes the fragmented information—from policies, contracts, renewals, broker reports, and vendor platforms—into a unified, searchable repository. Using the platform, human resources leaders can monitor benefit spending and usage, as well as manage renewals, policy reviews, and governance workflows.

Staff members can also use Origin’s platform to inquire about their available benefits. In multinational companies with complex benefits offerings across different geographies, obtaining an answer to this apparently straightforward question could previously take days. Now, responses are delivered within minutes.

While that is beneficial for employees, the primary advantage of using Origin’s platform is that it enables organizations to optimize their benefits expenditure, eliminating duplication and helping them consolidate providers, according to Bruce. The company whose CFO estimated annual benefits spending at $750 million now anticipates saving approximately $75 million by using Origin’s platform, Bruce said. Another Origin client consolidated 13 local insurance policies into a single regional plan, realizing a 20% cost reduction, according to the company.

Origin’s Cuido platform was developed collaboratively with several large multinational employers that serve as Origin’s anchor customers, including Pfizer, Comcast, and BP. Bruce said the company approached 11 major multinational corporations two years ago, presented its vision, and invited them to participate as paying co-creators. Seven of those 11 agreed. A large technology firm that initially declined in order to build a comparable system internally ultimately joined Origin 10 months later after scrapping its own project, Bruce said.

Origin presently employs approximately 75 people and maintains sales and marketing teams in both the United States and the United Kingdom and Europe. The company employs what Bruce calls “a value-based pricing model” that is linked to the complexity of a client’s organization, including the number of countries in which it operates.

Origin’s new funding will be allocated to enhancing integrations with existing human capital management platforms, such as those from Workday and Oracle’s Peoplesoft, making benefits data available within employees’ existing workflows, and expanding Origin’s partner capabilities for brokers, consultants, and insurers.

Andy Leaver, operating partner at Notion Capital, said in a statement that his firm is increasing its investment in Origin due to the team’s speed and execution. “Benefits are one of the last major enterprise functions still left behind by the digitisation wave of the last 25 years,” Leaver said. “AI now makes it possible to build a true system of record and intelligence for benefits.”