Benefits Infrastructure 101 for Seed-Stage Startups: What to Build Before It Breaks

Benefits infrastructure encompasses the platforms, vendors, processes, and governance that make employee benefits actually work. Seed-stage startups don't need enterprise systems, but they do need five foundational elements: a single source of truth for employee data, clear ownership, documented vendor relationships, a compliance calendar, and an exit path from current contracts. These take hours to establish and prevent months of expensive cleanup later.