From direct deposit to open offices to Zoom meetings, nearly every facet of the way we work has transformed. But the way we access and manage our employee benefits remains stubbornly attached to the era of paper checks and fax machines.

At best, most employees juggle multiple physical benefit cards and toggle between several different web portals. At worst, they are emailing (dare I say faxing!) receipts, filling out paper forms, and spending valuable time chasing down account balances and reimbursements via phone — all to access money and benefits that they have already earned. The experience isn’t much better for employers and benefit administrators. They strive to deliver a great experience for employees and customers — providing guidance and encouraging utilization — but do so through antiquated systems with a heavy reliance on understaffed call centers.

This is all particularly striking because there’s nothing (else) antiquated about employee benefits today. They are a critical lever of recruitment, retention, and wellbeing. And many companies commit not simply to the best versions of medical, dental, and vision plans, but to a rich array of consumer-directed, ancillary, and voluntary benefits as well. From EPOs and FSAs through to transit, fitness, and fertility options, an employee’s open enrollment experience now feels a lot more like filling a shopping cart than casting a ballot.

This should be a significant and positive change for employees, who have more control over their healthcare dollars and a more useful and responsive overall suite of benefits options. Sadly, innovation in benefits technology has never kept pace with innovation in benefits products. The seamless, intuitive experiences consumers have come to expect are all but nonexistent here. In addition to the impact on satisfaction and costs, we’re all but certain that this has led to significant underutilization of benefits that can make a real difference in employees’ lives.

We’re in the midst of a dramatic shift in benefits offerings from standardized to specific to personalized. We see this evolution as ongoing and enormously promising, from a social and financial perspective. We also think it’s gone about as far as it can without accompanying transformation in the infrastructure of benefits provision.

Many have recognized that the benefits experience was due for a comprehensive overhaul — but it’s the seasoned and ambitious team at Elevate that has done it. With deep industry expertise and a track record of scaling benefits platforms alongside Fortune 1000 companies, Elevate stands alone among the next-generation challengers. Elevate is completely reimagining how employers and employees access, manage, and experience consumer-directed benefits. Anthemis is very proud to lead their latest funding round, which was announced last week.

Elevate is the only API-driven consumer-directed benefits platform built on a modern technology stack, with the ability to support all plan types on a single platform and card. The core product is a platform that allows users to easily create and access benefits plans with intuitive and fully configurable attributes, providing a streamlined experience to employers and employees. Employees can manage their pre-tax benefits from one dashboard (web or mobile!), and use a single payment card to draw from a vast universe of benefits options across health care, education, transportation, lifestyle and more. Claims are processed instantly and reimbursements are remitted within minutes. Meanwhile, employers can use a simple, powerful online platform to build and customize benefits plans that respond to the needs of their workforces.

Brian Cosgray, Brian Strom and the Elevate team have brought a first-rate product to market that is simultaneously superior, cheaper, and more flexible than the competition. From the moment customers are onboarded onto the platform until the second they get reimbursed, Elevate is driving down operational costs while driving up client and customer satisfaction.

The team is as exciting to us as the platform they have built together. Each founding team member brings experience, creativity, integrity, and purpose to their respective roles — from founding an in-house consumer-directed benefits platform to leading multiple successful exits as an entrepreneur. All share a deep passion for solving this stubborn problem at scale.

More than half of insured Americans obtain their benefits through employers. We are overdue for better solutions and building them will have a meaningful impact. Making it easier to manage and utilize benefits will enhance employee satisfaction, reduce employers’ operational costs, and empower employees to invest in their own physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing.

Elevate is on a mission to revolutionize the consumer-directed benefits experience, and we look forward to partnering with them in their journey to becoming the premier technology-centric solution in this market. Over time, we expect them to do more than transform a legacy system: we believe that they’ll become the critical infrastructure for innovative benefits programs that are more responsive, empowering, and useful for the diverse, often distributed workforces of the future. We are thrilled and excited to work with them to realize that vision.