$5 Million Dollars, from Us to You

You may have read about us in the news, or even heard us on the radio. If so, you may know that we’ve just raised $5 million CAD. That’s a lot of money. It’s also a lot of Canadian money, proudly earned from one of Canada’s largest insurers through Diagram, an influential new VC fund.

What you might not know, however, is that all five million of those dollars are for you.

They are for the hard-working small and medium business owners, for the office administrators and HR professionals who keep the workplace safe and sane, and for the aspiring entrepreneurs who are onboarding their very first employees with visions to scale to infinity. That’s because we’re using the funding to build the future of the employee experience in Canada.

This is a very exciting time for Collage, as this investment takes us one step closer to fulfilling our mission of making the work experience better for every employee in Canada. And this is just the very beginning.

Read our press release, copied in full below, to learn about our team, our vision, and how we’ve already begun reinventing the way Canadian businesses manage their teams and take care of their people:

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Collage, Canada’s first all-digital HR & benefits platform, announces $5M in seed funding

Collage is the first platform that allows businesses to quote, buy, and manage benefits plans online

TORONTO, ON, February 15, 2017 – Today Collage, the free HR and benefits management platform, announced $5M in funding from the venture capital launchpad Diagram. Founded in Toronto in August 2016 by Elijah Moore, Peter Demangos (a 9-year veteran of the benefits industry), and Steven Hanna, Collage’s cloud-based software application helps businesses automate the administrative work involved with HR, group benefits, and payroll administration. Collage is the first platform to provide Canadian businesses with an all-digital solution to quote, buy and manage their benefits plans online, with the ability to seamlessly integrate that plan with Collage’s HR software.

“We started Collage to lead a fundamental shift in the way businesses buy and manage their benefits plans,” said Elijah Moore, co-founder and CEO of Collage. “Most businesses still manage their HR and benefits using paper and spreadsheets, which is wildly inefficient and prevents a lot of small businesses from providing proper coverage for their employees. We are the first in Canada to give business a way to quote, buy and manage a benefits plan entirely online, and we sync it with our free HR platform.”

Collage’s platform allows employers to easily manage paperless onboarding, time off tracking, employee record storage and management, and payroll updates. Employees can manage their banking and personal information, request and track time off, change their personal information, and manage their benefits program.

“Collage is paving the way for HR and benefits management online, transforming something traditionally time-consuming and tedious into a great experience for both the employer and employee,” said François Lafortune, CEO of Diagram. “Our focus is on finding and investing in the best insurance technology in Canada, and Collage was a natural choice for one of our first investments at Diagram.”

Collage is a registered insurance broker in Ontario and British Columbia, with licensing applications out for approval for the remainder of Canada, and can integrate with all major Canadian insurance companies. Traditionally, purchasing a benefits plan could take anywhere from two to six weeks but with Collage the whole process can be completed within one day. With Collage, employers can choose the right benefits plan, purchase the plan online, and then manage the program through their Collage account. Employers with existing benefits programs can easily transfer that program into Collage at no cost, and switching to Collage can provide savings of 20% to 30% simply through automated data verification.

“We have completely enhanced the benefits experience and have removed the complexity associated with implementing and communicating an employee benefits plan” said co-founder of Collage, Peter Demangos, who has been in the benefits industry for 9 years. “We believe that every employee should have a benefits plan, and one way Collage is ensuring that happens is by making the quoting, buying, and management process as seamless as possible.”

The investment in Collage was among the first two made by Diagram, a Montreal-based launchpad that recently announced the close of a $25M fund backed by Power Financial Corporation (TSX:PWF) and certain of its subsidiaries via Portag3 Ventures LP, and a group of 50 prominent Canadian angel investors. The launchpad invests primarily in insurance and financial technology, and Collage’s focus on helping HR professionals and small business owners easily manage their HR and benefits aligned perfectly with Diagram’s investment thesis.

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About Collage

Collage is the first all-digital HR and benefits platform in Canada that allows businesses to quote, buy, and manage benefits plans online. Collage helps businesses to take care of their people by making it easy to provide a digital, seamless HR and benefits experience. The company was founded in 2016 and is based in Toronto, Ontario. Collage’s approach is to empower small and medium businesses by eliminating tedious paperwork and simplifying Canadian compliance requirements. By using Collage to manage their people, both employers and employees can focus less on administration and spend their time on their meaningful work.

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