LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ravio, which provides real-time compensation data and analytics to fast-growing tech startups, is emerging from stealth today and announcing a $10 million seed round led by Northzone with participation from Cherry Ventures and Spark Capital.
Attracting and retaining talent is the number one challenge for fast-growing tech companies. But it has never been more difficult. The rise of remote work, fast moving markets and the so-called great resignation have seen the war for tech talent go global. In this context getting compensation right - salary, equity and benefits - is critical to stay competitive. Yet, most companies don’t have up to date information on what the market is offering in compensation, or if they are paying their teams fairly.
Ravio’s core benchmarking product is free and operates on a sharing principle. Companies can anonymously and securely contribute their data with one-click integrations, and in exchange access market benchmarks and compare themselves to similar companies. Ravio’s wider suite of products allows companies to manage and communicate their compensation internally, from running performance review cycles to educating candidates on equity packages and vesting.
Ravio’s three founders have strong track records of launching and scaling high-growth tech businesses. Roy Blanga and Merten Wulfert, who jointly run the company as co-CEOs, have been working together for the past 7 years, most recently at Deliveroo where they built the company’s international operations from scratch and led the business through the hyper-growth stages up to pre-IPO. Roy was COO of Deliveroo, while Merten oversaw the company in APAC and the Middle East. The product and technical team is led by Raymond Siems, CPTO, who has built and sold two startups, most recently in the AI space.
“We’ve experienced first hand how hard it is to hire and retain great teams and scale internationally. Getting compensation right from day one is crucial and it only gets harder the larger you become. When we were growing, we couldn’t find any reliable or real-time data to help us determine the right compensation for each person on our team. We lost great people, and missed out on key hires as a result. We’re surprised that no one has built a better solution to this problem yet” says Roy Blanga, co-CEO.
Michiel Kotting, Partner at Northzone comments: “We see a huge market shift happening which is going to leave behind companies who don’t modernise their approach around compensation. Winning companies will be transparent with compensation in the context of rising prices (inflation, cost of living, logistic costs) and a tighter talent market, especially in tech. Roy, Merten and Raymond are going after a problem that all companies big or small have, and are poised to build a leading company in the category.”
