Today we’re excited to launch Clasp. Our mission is to make employee benefits more connected and accessible to every person through better infrastructure.

With $6.5M in funding, led by Base10 Partners, along with Terrain and Conversion Capital, we are building the “Stripe for Health Benefits” to power the buying and administration of benefits on HR, payroll, and digital brokerage platforms.

Our Story

Employers spend over a trillion dollars on benefits every year and over 85% of employees still find their benefits confusing, leading to low utilization and loss of coverage. These issues are a direct result of the integration gaps with benefit providers and legacy systems that HR platforms are forced to work with to support their customers’ health benefits.

While working at Check, my co-founder Zach and I helped launch over a dozen successful payroll businesses. We experienced the pain of trying to integrate with legacy benefits providers. Stringing together systems with multiple logins and no centralized source of truth resulted in frequent user error, unhappy customers, and a product gap that made it hard to sell to employers with more than a handful of employees.

We knew there had to be a better way to build benefits.

Co-founders Zach Zhang (Left) and Amar Jasarbasic (Right)

Clasp is approaching this problem from the ground up by providing employee benefits infrastructure as a service. Our API provides anyone with the building blocks to launch a benefits product in a fraction of the time it would take to acquire a company or build the same software from scratch. Platforms can now embed Clasp and allow their customers to set up and manage their health benefits in their product. Clasp removes the barrier of complexity that comes with supporting hundreds of insurance carrier integrations, calculating payroll deductions, and staying on top of ACA compliance.

The HR Unbundling

We are in the midst of a transformational shift in the way that HR software is being sold to employers. HR is being unbundled into vertical software and business-in-a-box platforms, built entirely around the unique needs of the workforce. For restaurant owners, that means running payroll for their employees in Toast (TOST:NYSE), and for construction companies, it means tracking time sheets in Procore for accurate job costing reports (PCOR:NYSE). These platforms know their customers best and are ideally positioned to capture the workforce needs of their respective verticals. 

No HR offering is complete without benefits. It makes it impossible to compete against incumbent solutions where employers are accustomed to having HR, payroll, and benefits bundled together. Due to the sheer complexity of building benefits software, Clasp presents the ultimate partnership model for this massive wave of vertical platforms coming online with new HR offerings. Clasp provides these platforms with a reliable and scalable way to bring benefits to the millions of businesses and employees they already serve with their products today.

Embedded Infrastructure as a Service

By focusing on utility, over use cases, APIs like Stripe for payments, Twilio for SMS, or Check for payroll, have peeled away all of the complicated and undifferentiated aspects of the underlying service they power. Robust infrastructure pushes the frontier for new and more powerful use cases. Rather than reinventing the wheel on the backend, developers can focus on innovating on the unique features that will differentiate them in the market for their unique customer base.

Similarly, software platforms can now build and launch a fully-featured benefits product in just a few weeks, with Clasp providing the underlying infrastructure to make benefits administration easy.

Get in Touch

We can’t wait to see all of the innovative employee benefits use cases that Clasp will help power. If you’re a SaaS platform, broker, or a developer looking to build something new in the space, our team is excited to meet you.