Company Performance Metrics
- Brian Bentow: CTO
Nick Taranto: Founder & CEOPast Role: HOP WTR, Founder & Chairman
Most companies with 25–500 employees are overpaying for health benefits, often by 20–40%, and their broker has never shown them why. Ignition Benefits is an AI-native employee benefits brokerage built for U.S. founders, CEOs, and operators at venture-backed startups and fast-growing companies with 25 to 200 employees.
Unlike traditional brokers
and PEO solutions, Ignition operates with full fee transparency, every dollar of broker compensation disclosed, and runs a genuine full-market audit at every renewal with no preferred carriers.
At the core of Ignition's offering is the Benefits Risk Score: a proprietary assessment, the same risk signal insurance carriers use internally to price your plan, that most employers have never seen. Ignition puts this score directly in front of founders so they can negotiate from a position of knowledge, not guesswork. For a 36-person company, this approach saved $160,000 in year one.
Ignition is purpose-built for two high-intent moments: companies facing annual renewal increases (typically 10–20% year-over-year) and startups evaluating a PEO exit as they approach or surpass 50 employees.
The platform compresses what traditionally takes 8–12 weeks of broker work into 14–21 days and delivers the depth of analysis that legacy brokers reserve for 500-person enterprises to companies at every stage of growth, from first hire through mid-market.
Key services include PEO evaluation and lift-out, funding structure optimization (fully insured to level-funded or self-insured), Benefits Risk Score generation, and renewal benchmarking against current market rates.