SAN FRANCISCO – Ease, a leading HR and benefits software solution for small businesses, insurance brokers, and insurance carriers, today announced $41 million in Series C funding led by Spectrum Equity with participation from existing investors Centana Growth Partners, Propel Venture Partners, Freestyle Capital, Compound Ventures and Upside Partnership. In conjunction with the investment, Vic Parker from Spectrum Equity will join Ease’s board of directors.
“SMBs often do not have dedicated personnel or technology resources to facilitate critical health, life and medical insurance decisions for their employees. Ease provides a cloud-based platform to solve a long-standing structural pain point of distributing critical and complex insurance products to a widely dispersed SMB market,” said Vic Parker, Managing Director of Spectrum Equity. “Ease has done a brilliant job working with insurance brokers to help even the smallest companies modernize their benefits administration tech stacks. We’re excited to collaborate with David and the Ease team as they continue to provide a unified system of record for critical benefits data accessed by businesses, brokers and insurance carriers.”
The new round of financing brings the company’s total funding to $70 million and is further validation from the investor community that today’s benefits and HR industry is due for advancements and is poised for growth. With the explosion of remote work as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ease’s mission to bring the benefits enrollment and management process online, eliminate tedious and complicated insurance paperwork, and increase employee access to their benefits information has become increasingly essential. With this latest round, Ease will use the funds to enable SMBs to leverage employee data to connect all their systems, as well as hire new talent, including the recent appointment of Mari Kemp to Senior Vice President of HR.
“This pandemic reinforced an already accelerating trend: companies are becoming increasingly more reliant on digital solutions to conduct business and meet their employees’ needs, and brokers who have not already adopted more modern technology capabilities, are running the risk of becoming obsolete,” explained David Reid, Co-Founder and CEO of Ease. “I am proud of what Ease has accomplished over the past year — we have shown that our team is ahead of the market with our technology. We are thrilled to add Spectrum Equity, a strategic partner with demonstrated success scaling insurtech and SMB-focused companies of our scale, to our investor group. With the support of our investors, we have a clear path ahead to continue to work with forward thinking carriers that are committed to helping SMBs and the millions of people they employ.”
Founded in 2012, Ease works with companies that range in size from as few as two to 250 employees and is now used by over 2,000 insurance agencies to forge a deeper relationship with their 75,000+ clients and more than 2.5 million employees. Through Ease’s EaseConnect+ offering, a first-to-market solution launched in 2018, one million SMB employees have their health benefit data connected directly to their insurance carriers via Ease.
About Ease
Ease is an online benefits enrollment system built for insurance brokers and employers. Ease makes it simple to set up and manage benefits, onboard new hires, stay compliant, and offer employees one destination for all their human resources information. Started in 2012 in San Francisco by employee benefits veteran David Reid and web and engineering architect Courtney Guertin, Ease works with insurance brokers and small businesses to create seamless HR and benefits processes on an easy-to-use system. Ease has offices in Las Vegas, New York, Omaha and San Diego. In 2015, Ease was launched on the West Coast and is among the most widely adopted, fastest growing solutions for brokers and employers in the area, with more than 75,000 employers and over 2.5 million employees. For more information, head to www.ease.com.
