Twic, the life benefits platform, has announced a new brand name—Forma—as well as a $40 million fundraising round.
The new name is part of the company’s broader rebranding effort and renewed focus on providing customized benefits that “form” to customer needs, it said. The company’s $40 million was raised in a Series B round that will be used to scale operations, bringing its total raised to date to more than $57 million. The founder and CEO of Shopify, co-founder of Airbnb and co-founder and CEO of Lattice all participated in the latest round, the company said in an announcement.
“Employers have historically provided cookie-cutter benefits models as they aren’t able to make benefits flexible at scale," Max Hsieh, co-founder and CTO, said in the announcement. "However, with the new ways of working brought on by the pandemic, employees now demand more flexibility and choice from employers. Forma’s life benefits platform answers a greater market need for flexible benefits as companies redefine the way they work and look for new ways to engage teams.”
Forma, which was founded in 2017, offers benefit categories that include basic health and protection, and money and health. The process to set up traditional benefits programs is “very inefficient,” co-founder and CEO Jason Fan told Fierce Healthcare. That’s not the fault of employees involved in building out those programs, he acknowledged; there is a lot of bureaucracy to navigate with few resources. As a result, programs can be rigid and not meet all the varying needs of a diverse workforce.
Forma hopes to shift the paradigm from “one size fits some” in benefits to the ability to choose based on any characteristic, including age group, gender, lifestyle and culture.
The company manages contracting, renewal, payments, sign-up, fulfillment and shipping for clients, and manages $500 million in benefits budgets annually for more than 125 companies, including Lululemon, Zoom and Stripe. The company’s revenue has grown four times over the past year, it said, and it has increased its customer base by 330%.
“We worked intentionally with Forma to create wellness, professional development, meal delivery, work-from-home, and now co-working space programs for Rhinos,” Julienne Fleury, vice president of people operations at Rhino, said in the announcement.
The deposit insurance company has a high employee engagement rate (80%) on Forma’s platform and relieves the administrative burden on the people operations team, Fleury said.