In today’s environment, startups have to do a number of seemingly contradictory things at the same time. First, they need to keep the employees (the ones they want to keep anyway) happy. The other is recruiting new employees in a market where competition for talent is still fierce. In their arsenal to deal with this, they have “employee benefits,” be it mental health sessions or restaurant vouchers. However, many of these arrangements leave much to be desired.

The market for ’employee benefits & well-being’ is said to be worth it €200 billion, and Europe accounts for more than 40% of that market.

However, employee involvement in benefits hovers around 20%, meaning companies are wasting a lot of money on unused packages.

Cover flexa startup from Portugal, thinks it has at least some of the answers.

The solution claims to enable a company to design more customized employee benefits such as health insurance, meal allowance, fringe benefits, and discounts by merging multiple providers. It says its platform then enables companies to reduce costs with tax-friendly benefits while increasing employee value and improving their financial knowledge about compensation and benefits.

It has now landed in a €15 million Series A led by Paris-based CVC SCOR Ventures. Breega (pre-seed lead investor) reinvested, as did MS&AD, Armilar, Stableton, BiG Start Ventures and Shilling. Angels participating are Firmin Zocchetto (CEO at PayFit), Job van der Voort (CEO at Remote), Humberto Ayres Pereira (CEO at Rows), Alessandro Petazzi (co-founder of Musement) and Davide Dattoli (founder of Talent Garden), among other things.

In a statement, Coverflex CEO Miguel Amaro said: “In the current macro environment, this Series A round confirms our ambitious vision, product-market fit in Portugal and a market opportunity in Europe, especially in Italy.” The company plans to aggressively target that country in the future.

Will Thorne, head of SCOR Ventures who will join the company’s board of directors, also noted, “Employers have an opportunity to reimagine employee benefits management and improve employee satisfaction while closing the care and protection gap using a new generation of tools and services. Coverflex enables companies and employees to realize this ambition.”

Coverflex claims to have 3,600 customers, including Santander, Natixis, OysterHR, Bolt, Emma, ​​Revolut and Smartex, with 70,000 active users, using Coverflex more than 8 times per month on average.