Cocoon: Employee Leave, Simplified
When a unique insight is discovered by an execution-oriented team, an enduring company is sure to be found. CEO & Cofounder, Mahima Chawla left Square to start Cocoon after having spent months delving into the world of family and finance. Along with two other fintech veterans coming out of Stripe, Lauren Dai and Amber Feng, they’d discovered an unmet need in leave management. Whether it’s parental, medical or bereavement, employers and employees are underserved by the existing solutions available to them. Navigating a leave on the employee side is usually the least of your troubles when the need for a leave arises. On the employer side, it’s time consuming, inefficient, and equally complex.
From a personal standpoint, the timing of our partnership with Cocoon could not have been better. I was pregnant with my second child and knew firsthand that the filing process for parental leave was opaque, stressful and easy to screw up even though I'm privileged to have 100% paid leave — only one in five private-sector employees has access to any paid leave through their employer. On September 26th 2020, my son became Cocoon baby #1 and since then Cocoon has helped countless employees navigate parental, medical, and bereavement leave and is now available in all 50 states.
Your most important financial relationship is no longer with your bank, it’s with your employer. The employer has become the most important distribution channel for financial products. Additionally, in this competitive hiring market it’s more important than ever that the benefits employers offer to their employees relieve financial stress, particularly as the regulatory climate continues to amplify the importance of paid family and medical leave as well as further complicate the number of policies employers must adhere to. A number of states have released their own paid leave programs and on the federal level, we see this happening through Biden’s American Families Plan — XYZ is a supporter of PL+US: Paid Leave for the United States, an organization pushing these initiatives forward. Mahima, Lauren and Amber have raised a total of $26M from our good friends at Index and First Round to capitalize on this moment and bring clarity and simplicity to the employee leave experience.
