EaseCentral rebrands to Ease, updates system

Benefits administration and HR software provider EaseCentral has changed the company’s name to Ease, updated its system and raised $19 million in Series B funding that will be used to launch new products and hire talent, the company said Tuesday.

The changes are a sign of the company’s evolution to focus on helping human resource professionals ease benefits administration, says Ease CEO David Reid.

“When we started out [in 2015] we intended to bring small group enrollment online for agencies across the country,” Ease CEO David Reid says. “Today, the expectations of business owners and their employees have grown, and our goal is to bring a powerful, modern solution to businesses still using paper for their HR processes.”

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Changing the company’s name was “a natural next step,” Reid says.

“Our customers have been calling us Ease for years, and if there’s one thing that’s part of our DNA, it’s that we listen to our customers,” Reid says.

With the name change comes new capabilities within the system. Chief among them is EaseConnect+, which offers a first-to-market solution for SMB carrier connectivity.

“EaseConnect+ is the ability to submit enrollments and mid-year changes for companies down to two employees directly to insurance carriers,” Reid says. “Further, this experience is set up and managed by our team, which makes it a seamless process.”

Companies including Principal Financial, Guardian and Humana have already taken advantage of the new feature, Ease says.

Features that go along with the update include the ability for businesses to directly submit benefit enrollment to national insurance carriers. Ease also added partner collaboration features that better connect to third-party administrators and carriers.

The newest round of funding — led by Centana Growth Partners, with Propel Venture Partners, Compound Ventures, Freestyle Capital and Upside Partnership also participating — has already been used to hire experts Petar Nedyalkov as COO and Toshi Kureha as vice president of engineering.

“Nedyalkov and Kureha are senior leaders who come from very strong technology company backgrounds,” Reid says. “To be successful in our goal of modernizing and personalizing the employment experience we believe we need a good mix of industry experts and Silicon Valley technologists.”

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