Coming off a stellar start to the year, our newest portfolio company Elevate CDB announced yesterday that they had raised Series A funding. This follows our initial Series Seed investment in the company in January of this year. Elevate provides a modern platform for companies, employees, and benefit administrators to manage consumer-directed benefit accounts. Detailed below is additional information on the well-equipped team, innovative product, and why we’re beyond excited for this investment.
Who?
Building upon years of experience and a strong track record in the CDB space, co-founders Brian Cosgray (CEO) and Brian Strom (CTO) set their sights on a new approach for how employers and employees manage corporate benefits. Both Co-Founders come to Elevate as serial entrepreneurs. Brian Cosgray has experience being at the helm of a business, with experience in retail, wealth management, human resources, and most recently developing and launching a proprietary, in-house consumer-directed benefits platform for Fortune 500, government, and mid-sized business clients at his previous startup. Brian Strom has a highly technical background and a lot of prior experience founding and running one of the nations largest benefit savings providers in ConnectYourCare. Cosgray and Stroms’ deep experience, vision, and expertise in the CBD space are vital to modernizing the industry. We talk a lot at Bowery Capital about meeting "students of industry," founders that really get the operating space they are entering into. This was one of those cases where momentum came quickly as we realized their expertise and innovation in the category.
What?
Elevate is building a modern, seamless, and transparent platform for the administration of consumer-directed benefits. Elevate leverages financial technology to make consumer-directed benefits easier for employees and their families to understand and use while allowing employers to customize their benefits offerings. Elevate’s platform is used by consumers to view, plan, pre-tax benefits from one web and mobile dashboard. Elevate can be used to dissect benefits offerings and allows instant processing of benefits and reimbursement for employees.
Why?
Today’s CDB platforms rely on inefficient legacy technologies that do not meet modern administrator and employer needs around reporting, plan adjustments, and timeliness of approvals. A large majority of active CDB software platforms were developed more than 15 years ago. Outdated code bases mean Elevate’s incumbent competitors are limited in their ability to incorporate modern features like white-labeling and often struggle to provide the level of configurability that is necessary given the complexity of today’s CDB landscape. Elevate’s cloud-first, attributes-based CDB software suite emphasizes flexibility and can address the pain points in today’s market. The use of automation, configurability, and integration will drive real savings for adopters. This is core to the replacement cycle thesis we were founded on and see at Bowery Capital. With a strong team, innovative product, and clear market opportunity, we are ecstatic to see what the future holds for Elevate.
Where?
Elevate is based in Denver, Colorado.
