As companies beef up their benefits to attract talent, a California technology firm powering those efforts has closed a $45 million fundraising round, and it could mean jobs in Durham.
Noyo, which has developed an API platform that allows insurance and benefits data to flow from point to point, raised the round from several firms, including Norwest Venture Partners.
CEO Shannon Goggin said the round validates the technology her team has been building.
Goggin cofounded the firm with Dennis Lee, the COO. The pair were colleagues at Zenefits in San Francisco, where they saw first hand the challenges the industry was facing when it came to tech modernization.
“We were really trying to build an exciting user experience but pretty quickly found out that without the right data and the right infrastructure behind the data, it was really difficult for us to do that,” Goggin said.
So the pair struck out on their own, founding Noyo in 2017. Lee, a Duke alum, had moved to Durham with his family.
“We said, there’s no reason either one of us should have to move,” Goggin said.
So the company started with a distributed model, with 25 percent of its employees in California, 25 percent in Durham at American Underground and the rest working remotely elsewhere. Today there’s about 20 employees in Durham. And with the latest round, that number could increase.
“We are hiring very aggressively and we love bringing new people on in Durham and want to be part of the tech scene there,” Goggin said.
She said the differentiator – the way Noyo competes with other tech employers in tight markets like the Triangle – is through its professional development strategy. It’s baked into the methodology, she said. Twice a year, employees sit down with their managers and talk about their careers, what they envision, and how they can get there.
As a benefits company, Noyo tries to lead by example. And Goggin said it’s working, even with increasing competition from companies such as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Apple (AAPL) and other insurance-minded tech firms such as PolicyGenius, which is also expanding in Durham.
Noyo’s technology looks to transform data connections between benefits software and insurance carriers. And with so many firms looking to modernize their systems, more growth is coming, Goggin said. The Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of remote work has made providing benefits across multiple states even more complex. And those benefits are critical to attracting and retaining talent – beefing up the demand for what Noyo can deliver, she said.
In addition to Norwest, other participates in the round were Workday Ventures, Gusto and Cap Table Coalition. Existing investors Costanoa Ventures, Spark Capital, Homebrew, Operator Collective, Fika Ventures, PrecursorVentures, Garuda Ventures, Core Innovation Capital, and Webb Investment Network also participated.