Grandhood wants to revolutionize the pension industry — and has just secured DKK 20 million in a new funding round!
Grandhood has just received new investments from us at SEED Capital as part of a DKK 20 million funding round, syndicated with our good friends at Sunstone Capital and Speedinvest. We invested in the company for the first time in 2017 together with Preseed Ventures, and the start-up has since proven to be a very interesting and attractive investment. We have seen a great progress in the company and are very confident about the experienced team behind it.
The pension industry has stagnated for a very long time; the well-established pension companies are all the same, and the customers are left with a pension plan which involves incomprehensible financial and legal terms, and meaningless numbers that rarely helps the customer making the right financial decisions. 96% of the people in Denmark find their pension plan too complex and hard to decode, and there is hardly any place to go for advice and guidance. Grandhood’s vision is to change the way we think pension, and to offer a simple, transparent and flexible pension savings solution for the more than 300.000 entrepreneurs and small businesses without pension savings.
The CEO and Co-Founder of Grandhood, Jon Lieberkind left his position on Wall Street as a Vice President & Investment Strategist with Bank of America — Merrill Lynch to build a company that shapes the future of pensions, together with CFO and Co-Founder, Mathias Bredkjær and CPO and Co-Founder, Jens Kam. Together they have created a digital challenger of the pension industry; the first 100% digital pension savings solution in the world, that will help entrepreneurs and SMEs to offer attractive pension savings plans for their employees.
Jon Lieberkind, CEO & Co-Founder says the following about the reasoning behind their product and company: ‘’In Grandhood we want to make pension savings simple and therefore launch a solution, which helps people to understand, gather and optimize their pension savings. Many people do not realize that 1 percentage point difference in annual fees makes a huge difference over time. High fees will erode your savings in the long run!’’
With the current pension industry, smaller businesses are not able to offer their employees decent pension solutions, since they do not have the opportunity to get the same quantity discount as bigger companies. This is a problem for many small companies and entrepreneurs, as they are forced to settle with higher fees and thus smaller returns on investments, all else equal. Hence, small businesses are often stuck in a vacuum resulting in little or no pension savings at all, which is obviously a drag on potential disposable income in retirement. Thus, Grandhood also serves a socio-economic purpose, which is to even out third age income in-equality!
There are currently no players in Europe focusing solely on B2B occupational pension plans, which is why Grandhood is such an interesting and exciting start-up to join. Also, companies can onboard in few minutes through the website and the employees will be able to register and obtain an individual risk profile in just 5 minutes solely by using the Grandhood app, which is based on very complex algorithms.
Grandhood has recently signed a partner bank agreement with Saxo Bank, which takes the business one step closer to realizing the final product.
We at SEED Capital are very excited about the future of Grandhood and believe that this could be a game changer in terms of how we do and think pension savings in the future. Think pension, just simpler!
Let’s not discuss the asset manager license application process in order not to irritate the Danish FSA.
Find out more about the company on: grandhood.dk
