The Venture Codex

Participated · Series C · Oct 2025

Nava Benefits operates as a modern benefits brokerage, combining proprietary technology with deep benefits expertise to lower costs and reduce administrative burden for growing businesses. Its platform delivers renewal strategy guidance, back-office benefits administration, and member support, positioning itself as a one-stop shop for HR teams. The company recently introduced HQ, a compliance-oriented workflow tool that flags errors and tracks deadlines, backed by SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA certifications for enterprise-grade security. Proceeds from the latest funding will accelerate Nava’s AI roadmap aimed at further automating routine benefits tasks for HR professionals, employees, and the firm’s own service staff. Nava touts itself as one of the first U.S. brokerages to tightly fuse technology with human expertise in the employee-benefits space, and its customer base is primarily comprised of small and mid-sized employers seeking cost savings and modern support. While no revenue or user metrics were disclosed, the company’s continued product rollout and venture backing underscore its growth ambitions.

Participated · Series B · Apr 2025

Thatch operates a marketplace and debit card to enable employers to offer Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements (ICHRA), allowing employees to purchase individual medical, dental, and vision plans or pay for care with leftover balances. The product lets employees choose plans, switch carriers, and spend remaining employer-provided budgets on treatments; Thatch reports about 50% of members carry an average $250 monthly balance. The company has integrated with QuickBooks to embed and distribute ICHRA and is building a similar offering for ADP. Thatch launched its offering in August 2023, has onboarded over a thousand companies in the last 18 months, and had 72 employees as of March. Revenue grew 8x year-over-year, though the company declined to disclose absolute revenue figures. Founders emphasize that ICHRA enables flexible employee classes and see ample room for product and fintech innovation around budgeting, payments, remittance, and adjudication. Thatch provides a personalized health benefits platform that combines fintech and healthtech, offering an interface to simplify the complex process of healthcare benefit management for employers and employees. Key features include simplified budget setting and fund allocation for employers, personalized plan selection tools for employees, integration of tax incentives and credits, and cost savings through pooled buying power. Since launching in 2023, Thatch has helped hundreds of companies across every sector improve their healthcare coverage while curbing costs; customers range from AI startups and small businesses to nonprofits and large enterprises with thousands of employees. Led by Chris Ellis and Adam Stevenson and based in San Francisco, the company plans to use new funding to expand its team, continue scaling its technology platform, and accelerate customer acquisition. The company raised $38M in a Series A round to support that growth. Thatch builds a platform to simplify health payments and benefits management for startups and their employees. The product sits on top of a company’s existing health plan and offers a tech-enabled Health Savings Account (HSA), a debit card for healthcare expenses, a receipt dashboard, and on-demand patient advocates via text to resolve billing issues. The company says it helps users determine HSA eligibility and see real-time tax savings from HSA use. Thatch aims to let businesses give employees great healthcare in under five minutes and is initially targeting startups that lack large HR budgets. It is also building a marketplace so founders can input a budget and select insurance policies and digital health vendors from the platform. Founded in 2021 by Chris Ellis and Adam Stevenson, Thatch is coming out of stealth and currently has eight employees and early funding.

Participated · Series B · Jun 2022

TaskHuman offers live, on-demand video chats with a global network of specialists across health, wellness, professional development and other personal needs, using an AI-powered natural-language search and a recommendation engine. Users pay with "TaskHuman minutes" for one-to-one sessions, and employers can subscribe to provide unlimited access, content and group sessions to employees. The company says it has over 1,000 coaches across nearly 50 countries and counts customers such as Zoom, Dr. Scholl’s, RingCentral, Purdue University, Oakland Housing Authority and U.S. Department of Labor Job Corps centers. TaskHuman plans to continue global expansion, scale its coach network, and add support for more languages and countries. Management reports annual recurring revenue has grown more than fivefold year over year. The platform emphasizes real-time, personalized engagement as its differentiator versus prerecorded or scheduled coaching offerings. TaskHuman provides an app that lets users instantly discover and connect with a global network of specialists covering nearly 1,000 aspects of daily life, including physical fitness, mental well-being, spiritual, emotional, financial, career and leadership coaching. Led by co-founder and CEO Ravi Swaminathan, the platform offers live 1:1 video calls, group sessions and in-app content. The company works with nearly 1,000 coaches from over 20 countries. Organizations can extend TaskHuman as an employee benefit; customers include Zoom Video Communications, Medidata, Purdue University, RingCentral, IntelyCare, Southwest Transplant Alliance, One Workplace and Freedom Learning Group. TaskHuman raised a $9.5m Series A and has $14.3m in total capital raised to date. The company plans to use the funds for product development, expansion into a wider range of topics, increased hiring and marketing.

Participated · Series C · Apr 2022

Oyster is a B Corp-certified global employment platform that enables companies to hire, pay, and care for distributed teams. The platform provides reliable, compliant contracts, payroll, and local benefits and perks to support people-centric hiring anywhere in the world. Founded in January 2020 by Tony Jamous and Jack Mardack and based in San Francisco, CA, Oyster focuses on enabling employers to employ distributed teams. The company received a $5M investment from ServiceNow Ventures and intends to use the funds to expand operations and its development efforts. This funding followed a recent Series D that valued Oyster at $1.2 billion and brings total capital raised to $291M. Oyster is a payroll and HR platform that specializes in global employment, enabling companies to employ and pay distributed workers by hiring on clients' behalf and remitting salaries. The 2019-founded U.S. startup focuses on paying remote workers in emerging markets, saying over 40% of people on its platform are in those markets and that it remitted “hundreds of millions” to workers in 2023. Oyster is B Corp-certified and in the last year launched products including Global Payroll, Visa Sponsorships, local compensation insights, and a no-code offering that embeds global hiring, payroll, and rewards into customers' HR products. Management says the company has grown more than 7x in two years and improved margins substantially. Clients and partners include TriNet BambooHR, Quora, Lokalise, and Printify. The new funding will be used to accelerate platform development and expand more generally. Founded in January 2020 by Tony Jamous and Jack Mardack, Oyster provides a platform to hire international employees compliantly, pay them instantly, and provide local benefits in 180+ countries. Customers already use the platform to pay more than $200 million to global talent each year. In 2021 the company grew revenue by over 20x and grew the number of team members employed on its platform by 17x. It has a team of 500 employees in over 60 countries. The company intends to use the funding to further develop its global employment platform and invest in the People Ops community. Oyster provides an HR platform for globally distributed companies designed to make hiring talented people around the world compliant, human, and delightful. The platform aims to enable growing organizations to give international team members a better experience without the usual headaches or expense. Oyster announced new investments from PayPal Ventures and HR Tech Investments, an affiliate of Indeed. The company communicated the funding news from San Francisco, CA. The announcement was published by Massinvestor, Inc. No financial terms, instruments, or operating metrics were disclosed in the article. Oyster provides a platform to help organizations hire and manage distributed workforces, offering hiring, onboarding, payroll, benefits, and salary-management services for contractors and full-time employees outside a company’s home country. The company reports exponential growth and now works with 80 large businesses to fill knowledge-worker roles. Pricing mentioned in the article ranges from $29 per person per month for contractors to $399 for full employees, with additional packages for larger deployments. Oyster holds B-Corp certification and emphasizes a mission to expand access to global job opportunities, including in emerging economies. The company was co-founded by Tony Jamous and Jack Mardack; Jamous is described as London-based. Oyster competes in a crowded market alongside companies like Deel, Papaya Global, Remote, and Turing.

Participated · Series C · Mar 2022

WorkRamp provides a learning platform for executives, employees and customers, offering self-guided learning paths, interactive coaching functionalities, and certification modules. Anyone in a company can create content in minutes rather than days, and the end-to-end process centers on collaboration. The company also offers a dedicated VIP Slack community for customers to share best practices and seek support. WorkRamp is used by more than 300 mid-market and enterprise businesses, including Box, Outreach, Reddit, Handshake, Branch, Hopin, GRIN and Vanta. The company intends to use the funds to continue product innovation, ramp customer success programs, and expand the team across departments. Led by CEO Ted Blosser, WorkRamp is based in San Francisco, CA. WorkRamp offers a user-friendly platform for companies to build and provision training materials—tests, videos, slide shows, flip cards and quizzes—using drag-and-drop tools. The product targets both employee onboarding and partner/customer education and integrates with third-party systems such as Salesforce, Workday and Zoom. WorkRamp positions itself as a modern alternative to legacy learning management systems, aiming for a consumer-grade experience and greater content creator control. The company was incubated in Y Combinator and has seen pandemic-driven demand for remote training. It reports roughly 250 customers and about 1 million courses created on the platform, including customers like Zoom, Box, Reddit, Intercom, Disney, GlobalData and PayPal. WorkRamp plans to add “Accenture”-style consultants to help larger, less tech-savvy customers adopt its tools more effectively. WorkRamp is a cloud-based employee onboarding and management platform that enables customers to create real-time in-person and digital programs and track their success via data and reports. The product lets users create onboarding programs to ramp up employees, run pitch certifications that include screen recording or slide sharing, and enable teams to give direct feedback. Customers can create role-customized learning paths, deliver critical content, and track important milestones. The company intends to use the new funds to expand its engineering team and build out its product line. WorkRamp was founded in 2015 and is led by CEO Ted Blosser; it is based in San Francisco, CA. The company has raised nearly $10m in total funding to date and closed an $8m Series A. Workramp provides a platform to organize and track new-employee onboarding tasks, training, and goal-setting, giving managers visibility via a dashboard. The product centralizes training across tools and aims to be a horizontal training data layer for teams. Co-founder Ted Blosser, who spent nearly five years at Box, leads the company. Workramp launched in 2015 and is a Y Combinator Summer 2016 graduate. The company currently has seven employees and about 50 customers. It plans to use its recent funding to hire additional sales and engineering talent and to ramp growth beyond its current customer base.