Workers today have more options than ever before when it comes to their careers and how they want to work. Simultaneously, employees remain a company’s greatest asset, adding to a hyper-competitive market to attract — and retain — top talent.

Distributed, remote, and hybrid work have all altered the talent experience and continue to do so. Virtual hiring and onboarding, automated payroll across multiple geographies for remote teams, and entirely distributed companies that need new compliance tools are just a few examples of this new landscape. The office is no longer the only place where company culture is created and team relationships are formed.

As a result, solutions centered around the talent experience are on the rise, built with employees vs. employers in mind. Throughout the talent experience lifecycle, we see products that strengthen a company’s brand to attract talent, support day-to-day work like onboarding and performance, data-driven infrastructure including payroll, expenses, human capital management platforms, and, finally, retention.

HR is moving to the forefront as a strategic business function at an accelerated pace as evidenced by the rise of Chief People Officers, Head of Talent Experience, and similar roles. For these leaders, tech is critical to lowering the barriers that will enable a great talent experience. This is especially clear in the compensation and benefits space.

At the same time, the way hiring and especially compensation decisions are made today within most companies is still arcane — to start, the process lacks structure and insight. To make important decisions grounded in real-time data, hiring managers need powerful modern tooling that enables more automated and insightful data analytics.

Bringing clarity to compensation

Companies currently spend tens of thousands of dollars on compensation benchmarking through consulting services or in-house in spreadsheets after buying compensation datasets. These are incredibly resource intensive and manual processes and, as a result, can only be done annually and yield limited insights.

A fast-scaling portfolio company of ours, Mondu, has lamented the old way of measuring compensation. “Benchmarking compensation has long been an old fashioned and rigid process,” says Jo McAllister, Head of Talent Acquisition at Mondu. “For us, having access to real-time valuable data as a fast-growing business will help us to make rapid decisions that will enable us to not only attract but retain the best talent on the market.”

Introduced to our portfolio this week, Ravio, founded by Merten Wulfert, Roy Blanga, and Raymond Siems, is setting out to change this. It’s breaking the current monopoly and making data cheaper and more granular through their compensation platform. Having access to compensation software real-time/all the time allows companies to set clear internal and external salary benchmarks and communicate them effectively to their employees — with the goal of improving talent attraction and retention. Ravio plans to quickly roll out its product to core European markets within a very short timeline. First stops — the UK and Germany.

The news of Ravio’s launch within our portfolio shortly followed headlines of their $10 million seed round, in which we participated alongside Northzone, Spark Capital, and several top angels.

Ravio empowers HR teams to become more data-driven, like other strategic functions in a company, by understanding deficits in each department to plan for costs, adjusting levels/grades — removing the manual work done by compensation and benefits teams and automating the entire workflow.

In addition to compensation benchmarking, Ravio is shipping additional products in the near future, such as a tool to help companies better communicate total rewards and another to take the pain out of running your compensation review cycles. They’ve already partnered with some of Europe’s top tech companies covering the whole spectrum from seed to publicly-listed like Deliveroo, Truelayer, Zego, Flink, Thread, and more.

Check out Ravio’s benchmarking database (free!) on their website to get started.