Vestigo Ventures and Ridge Ventures Invest in Aeqium as Pay Transparency, Stock-Based Compensation Challenges Accelerate

As government mandates requiring pay transparency accelerate, and volatile financial markets bring stock-based compensation challenges into focus, the urgency for employers to get their arms around compensation planning and management has reached a critical point. Employers are struggling to adapt while current and prospective employees are examining their options.­­­

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Aeqium simplifies compensation planning and flags pay equity issues with its automated total compensation management platform. Vestigo Ventures led the seed round with participation from Ridge Ventures. Photo: Peter McKee, co-founder & CEO of Aeqium

Aeqium is addressing these problems with its automated total compensation management platform. Vestigo Ventures coinvested with Ridge Ventures in the seed round, citing Aeqium’s management team, the market opportunity, and Aeqium’s capabilities as the new standard of compensation management. The platform automates manual workflows and gives compensation decisionmakers the insight they need to make better, collaborative decisions on everything from cyclical reviews and headcount planning to comp bands and pay equity. It eliminates the need to email sensitive documents, hunt for the right spreadsheet, and check old email threads – comp planning problems that are all too familiar to HR, finance, and functional leaders.

Aeqium’s platform provides a unified view for understanding compensation by pulling data from disparate HR and finance systems via HRIS, payroll, stock, and ATS integrations. It proactively surfaces pay issues like employees who are below target on stock-based compensation – problems that might otherwise go uncaught or require significant manual effort to identify.

Aeqium’s growing client list includes Braze, Hopper, and WHOOP. “Using Aeqium has significantly reduced the risk, lost time, and frustration that used to come from running our compensation planning," says Isabelle Winkles, CFO at Braze. “It is enabling leaders across our company to make informed decisions with confidence and speed, while giving employees a more interactive and tangible way to understand their compensation. Aeqium has been a true game-changer for us at Braze.”

“Aeqium has been instrumental in advancing our team's understanding of total compensation and has become the center of gravity for all things comp at WHOOP,” says Rob Case, SVP of Talent at WHOOP.

According to recent findings released by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), HR professionals say inadequate compensation is the biggest reason employees are leaving. Concurrently, in a WTW survey completed in November 2022, 75% of respondents indicated they are having problems attracting and retaining talent, while 12% said they are planning company restructurings and layoffs.

Prior to launching Aeqium, co-founders Peter McKee, Dwijen Patel, and Jared Katz held key roles at leading disruptors including Uber, Palantir, Braze, and Walmart Labs. “We have experienced first-hand the widespread inefficiencies in time and resources, and the loss of good employees, due to disconnected compensation planning processes and lack of the data needed to make the right decisions,” says Peter McKee, co-founder, and CEO of Aeqium. “New pay equity and transparency laws, and the recent focus on stock-based compensation issues, are creating a surge in attention on these problems, and employers stand to gain a long-term competitive advantage by solving them. Our platform automatically identifies comp issues that can erode employee satisfaction and retention, while giving time back to the people and teams involved in these processes. Aeqium can help you achieve compliance today, and the time savings and impact on retention will pay dividends for years to come.”

“Aeqium simplifies, automates, and empowers strategic compensation planning so organizations have the detail they need to be nimble amid shifting labor and financial markets,” says Ian Sheridan, co-founder of Vestigo Ventures, and an Aeqium board member.

“Compensation cycles are a painful yet critical step to company growth,” says Akriti Dokania, partner at Ridge Ventures. “Employees won't stick around without effective planning and pay management, but gathering information on pay, equity, and employee morale is a chore. Aeqium automates these mundane tasks and empowers HR leaders, CFOs, managers, and employees with a data-driven compensation cycle. It's truly the compensation platform that pays.”

“The frustration for employers is pervasive and, until now, organizations haven’t had the time or tools to deal with the issues,” says McKee. “Rather than being intimidated or frustrated, as they often are with finance and HR software, customers are excited to use the Aeqium platform and eager to find ways to do even more of their work inside of it.”

About Aeqium

Aeqium empowers managers and people teams to make better decisions quickly by automating away the months of spreadsheet work required today for compensation planning and analysis. We seamlessly integrate the people data scattered across systems and spreadsheets in your back office to give all compensation stakeholders in your company the right data when they need it. Our platform makes it easy to run a comp cycle, get actionable insights on employee comp across cash & equity, ensure pay equity, manage comp bands, and communicate total rewards to candidates and employees. Best of all, managers want to use our product, unlike the other systems that drove you to spreadsheets in the first place. Learn more at www.aeqium.com

About Vestigo Ventures

FinTech is changing the world of financial services. We founded Vestigo Ventures to find and fund the very best entrepreneurs in North America. We are in the epicenter of innovation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To learn more and to subscribe to our newsletter and podcast, visit www.vestigoventures.com.

About Ridge Ventures

Founded in 2007, Ridge Ventures is a seed and early-stage venture capital firm investing in founders who are redefining how the world interacts with data and code. Ridge takes a fast, flexible, and founder-focused approach, and backs companies delivering advanced technologies, new distribution models, and incredible user experiences. Follow us @ridgevc.

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