Bringing more transparency to employee compensation: our investment in Ravio

We are very proud to announce our investment in Ravio, leading their $10m seed round with the participation of our friends at Cherry Ventures and Spark Capital. Ravio allows fast-growing tech startups to stay on the pulse of talent market insights in real-time, with the most complete benchmarking tool in the market. 

Ravio is solving one of the most pressing challenges of HR professionals at VC-backed companies: compensation management. Fast-growing companies rely mostly on internal and static data points to build comprehensive compensation packages for their current or prospective employees, making it difficult to get a clear understanding of market rates as they design competitive packages: from salaries to equity, including employee benefits.

This challenge is further amplified in Europe through added geographic complexity: many European tech companies build teams spanning across multiple countries from day one. This makes it even more important for HR teams to have access to relevant local compensation benchmarks in real-time to ensure they can attract and retain the best talent in the market.

There comes Ravio, building a complete set of tools that empowers fast-growing businesses to better reward their talent. Starting today, their product gives HR leaders free access to Europe’s most comprehensive database of compensation data for tech roles. The product uncovers discrepancies at an individual level, but also job type and company ones. The team is already partnering with leading tech companies such as Deliveroo, TrueLayer, Flink, and Zego among dozens of users joining every week, adding more and more relevant data points to the platform.

Ravio is founded by Merten Wulfert, Roy Blanga and Raymond Siems, a unique founder trio that combines a deep understanding of the market with rigorous product leadership and proficiency in data engineering. Roy and Merten 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. The product and technical team at Ravio is led by Raymond Siems, who has built and sold two startups, most recently in the AI space. 

Commenting on the deal, our Partner Michiel Kotting added that “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.”

More importantly, as investors, we know that what gets measured gets done. We believe that with transparency, more biases and inequalities can be fixed, something that is impossible without clear access to market insights in real-time. Ravio is here to fix long term challenges for companies growing talent pools across different geographies. We believe that they are building an entire business category that will help millions of businesses.