The London startup, founded by the team behind Darwin, acquired by Mercer in 2016, has built an AI platform that ingests fragmented global benefits data from PDFs, insurance contracts, and vendor portals into a single intelligence layer. Notion Capital led the round; HSBC Innovation Banking UK also contributed growth financing.
One CFO told Origin’s CEO that he believed his company was spending roughly $750 million a year on employee benefits, but had no way to verify that number. Benefits, he said, were the only major budget line he couldn’t see clearly.
For a cost that is typically a company’s second-largest after headcount, that opacity is structural: benefits data in a multinational corporation sits across insurance policies in a dozen languages, broker reports, vendor portals, renewal documents, and local contracts in every country where the business operates.
No one has ever joined it all up. Origin, the London-based HR technology startup, has raised $30 million on the argument that AI now makes it possible.
The Series A+ round, announced today, was led by Notion Capital, which had also backed the company’s original Series A. Felix Capital, which led that earlier round in May 2025, and Acadian Ventures are participating again alongside all other existing investors.
HSBC Innovation Banking UK has provided additional growth financing alongside the equity raise. The new capital brings Origin’s total funding to over $50 million raised in under twelve months, following the $21 million Series A announced in May 2025 at a $106 million valuation.
Origin was founded by Chris Bruce, CEO, and Pete Craghill, CTO, the same pair who built Thomsons Online Benefits, later renamed Darwin, which held an 80% share of the non-US global benefits administration market at the time of its acquisition by Mercer in December 2016.
The idea for Origin came from a 2023 conversation between the two in which they concluded that advances in large language models had finally made tractable a problem they had tried and failed to fully solve fifteen years earlier.
The company spent its first eighteen months on the hardest part: data ingestion. Benefits data, Craghill told Fortune, is not just unstructured, it is wildly inconsistent in format, language, and completeness across geographies. Learning how to assess the quality of source materials before trusting the output was the prerequisite for everything else.
The platform’s AI engine, branded Cuido, processes policies, contracts, renewals, broker reports, and vendor platform data into a centralized intelligence layer that benefits and HR teams can interrogate in real time. The commercial case Origin is making is straightforward: the CFO who thought he was spending $750 million on benefits now expects to save around $75 million by using the platform.
A separate client consolidated 13 local insurance policies into a single regional plan, achieving a 20% cost reduction. Origin’s platform was co-created with anchor customers including Pfizer, Comcast, BP, and Boston Consulting Group, who were recruited as paying partners at the outset and helped shape the product roadmap.
Notion Capital’s decision to lead the current round after participating in the Series A is a signal of execution speed. Andy Leaver, the firm’s operating partner, noted that the company had moved quickly in acquiring and delivering for complex global clients while building a differentiated product vision.
The new capital will go primarily towards two areas: deeper integration with human capital management systems, so employees can access benefits information through the tools they already use at work, and building out the partner ecosystem for brokers, insurers, and consultants who serve the same multinational clients.
