Bringing Benefits to the Center: Our Investment in Fringe

When I first started my career, I worked in a building with an Equinox Gym in the basement. While it would have been nice if my employer paid for a membership there, the building also had a free gym for everyone to use. I went a few times, but I don’t think I ever saw another soul. Some companies in the building did offer Equinox memberships, but most of their employees barely went as well.

Such is the case for many of the non-core benefits offered by an employer. Even before the pandemic, few people actually used many of these perks and benefits. For example, EAP (Employee Assistant Programs) utilization consistently hovers below 10%! Even that ping pong table on a tech campus is used by a small fraction of the employee base. Yet employers pour billions each year into these benefits in the continuing war for talent.

Although all of this was true before 2020, the world has changed even more fundamentally. While employees are returning to work, there are still millions in the workforce that are remote or distributed and will remain so indefinitely. Mental health, and overall concepts of wellness, have never been more top of mind for employees and employers alike. Given all of these facts, employers simply cannot keep offering one-size-fits-all solutions to their employees to address their wellness needs.

Enter Fringe. Origin Ventures is proud to announce we are leading a $17M Series A round for the Richmond based company, with co-investments from prior investors: Felton Group, Manchester Story, and Sovereign’s Capital. We made a modest first investment in the company during the early days of the pandemic, giving us a front row seat to the continued rapid growth as their solution found true product market fit.

Fringe’s benefits marketplace gives employers the ability to address their employee’s needs in the most flexible way possible – by empowering the employees themselves to invest in the products, subscriptions, and services that are right for them. For some people, maybe that is a gym membership or a subscription to a meditation app. For others, it can be a coffee subscription or weekly UberEats.

Fringe is another investment that matches Origin’s theme of the Future of Work, joining a group of companies that include 15Five, Fountain, and many others. And it certainly won’t be the last. Millennial and Gen Zs are now the bulwark of the workforce, and when we couple that with the massive changes over the last few years, we believe there are many more innovations yet to be had as these disruptive waves continue.