The London-based startup Origin, founded by the creators of Darwin acquired by Mercer in 2016, has developed an AI platform to consolidate fragmented global benefits data from PDFs, insurance contracts, and vendor portals into a single intelligence layer. The funding round was led by Notion Capital, with additional growth financing from HSBC Innovation Banking UK.
A CFO once told Origin’s CEO that while he estimated his company spent approximately $750 million annually on employee benefits, he had no means to confirm this figure. Benefits, he admitted, was the only significant budget area lacking transparency. In multinational corporations, benefits data is spread across various insurance policies in different languages, broker reports, vendor portals, renewal documents, and local contracts in multiple countries.
No previous solution has unified all this data until now. Origin, the London-based HR technology startup, has raised $30 million on the premise that AI makes this integration possible.
The Series A+ funding round was led by Notion Capital, which also supported the original Series A. Felix Capital, which led the previous round in May 2025, and Acadian Ventures, along with all previous investors, participated again. HSBC Innovation Banking UK provided additional growth financing alongside the equity funding. This new capital brings Origin’s total funding to over $50 million within a year, following a $21 million Series A announced in May 2025, which valued the company at $106 million.
Origin was founded by Chris Bruce, CEO, and Pete Craghill, CTO, who previously established Thomsons Online Benefits, later known as Darwin, which commanded an 80% market share of the non-US global benefits administration at its acquisition by Mercer in December 2016. The concept for Origin emerged from a 2023 conversation between the founders, noting that advances in large language models had finally addressed a challenge they attempted to solve fifteen years earlier.
The company dedicated its first eighteen months to data ingestion, addressing the complexity of unstructured, inconsistent, and incomplete benefits data across geographies. Craghill told Fortune that it was crucial to assess the quality of source materials before trusting the output.
Cuido, the platform’s AI engine, transforms policies, contracts, renewals, broker reports, and vendor platform data into a centralized intelligence layer for real-time access by benefits and HR teams. The commercial argument is clear: the CFO who estimated a $750 million benefits expenditure now anticipates saving about $75 million using the platform. Another client streamlined 13 local insurance policies into one regional plan, achieving a 20% cost reduction.
Origin’s platform was co-developed with anchor customers, including Pfizer, Comcast, BP, and Boston Consulting Group, who were engaged as paying partners from the start, helping shape the product’s trajectory. Notion Capital’s decision to lead the current round is seen as an endorsement of Origin’s execution speed. Andy Leaver, the firm’s operating partner, highlighted the company’s swift progress in acquiring and delivering solutions for complex global clients while developing a distinct product vision. The new funding will mainly support deeper integration with human capital management systems, allowing employees to access benefits information via existing workplace tools and developing the partner ecosystem for brokers, insurers, and consultants serving multinational clients.