Fast Company Most Innovative Companies 2026 - #7 Workplace Overalls raises $15.8M total funding Jon Cooper: serial insurtech entrepreneur LifeConcierge NPS: 80+ (Apple scores ~72) Employees unlock 3.2 hours/week with Overalls 72% of users report lower stress within 30 days $4.6M seed backed by RPM Ventures & ex-NFL Jerod Mayo 3x higher engagement than traditional EAPs Fast Company Most Innovative Companies 2026 - #7 Workplace Overalls raises $15.8M total funding Jon Cooper: serial insurtech entrepreneur LifeConcierge NPS: 80+ (Apple scores ~72) Employees unlock 3.2 hours/week with Overalls 72% of users report lower stress within 30 days $4.6M seed backed by RPM Ventures & ex-NFL Jerod Mayo 3x higher engagement than traditional EAPs
Jon Cooper, Co-founder and CEO of Overalls
Founder Profile

Jon Cooper

Co-founder & CEO, Overalls  |  New York

He sold his first insurtech company. Then started another one. Now he's giving every employee in America a personal concierge - and Fast Company just called it one of the most innovative ideas in the workplace.

Fast Company #7 Workplace 2026 Serial Founder Wharton MBA Trilingual
3.2
hours/week unlocked per employee
80+
NPS score (vs Apple's ~72)
72%
of users report lower stress in 30 days
$15.8M
total funding raised
3x
higher engagement than traditional EAPs

Life keeps happening. He built a company to handle it.

There's a startup in New York called Overalls. Its tagline reads: "$#it happens." Enterprise HR departments loved it. Former Spanx CEO Laurie Ann Goldman - who taught Jon Cooper that how you communicate matters as much as what you say - would be proud.

Cooper co-founded Overalls in August 2021, roughly the same month he exited his previous company. Not a gap year. Not a strategic pause. Just: sold one, started another. That's not impatience. That's pattern recognition. He had already spent nearly a decade inside the insurance and benefits industry and knew exactly which problems nobody was solving.

"A majority of people dread dealing with insurance issues and don't think about insurance until it's too late. We want to demystify insurance and focus attention on what matters most to people - saving time, celebrating important milestones and planning for the future."

- Jon Cooper, Co-founder & CEO, Overalls

The product is called LifeConcierge. It combines AI-augmented technology with real human specialists who handle the daily chaos that employees bring to work inside their heads - childcare coordination, passport renewals, medical billing disputes, pet emergencies, estate planning, home repairs. The kind of problems you spend three hours on hold trying to fix while pretending to be in a meeting.

Overalls measures results in hours, not features. Users unlock approximately 3.2 hours per week. Twelve percent improvement in team output within a quarter. Eighty-plus NPS - higher than what Apple typically scores with its own customers, and Apple fans wait in line overnight for phones.

In 2026, Fast Company ranked Overalls #7 in the Workplace category of its World's Most Innovative Companies list. The "Small and Mighty" recognition acknowledged what happens when a lean team of roughly 110 people achieves outsized impact. Cooper would probably say the outsized impact was always the plan.

"The job of a leader is to enable its people to perform at their highest level."

- Jon Cooper

Before Overalls, there was Life.io. Cooper founded it in 2012 - a behavioral insurance customer engagement platform built on social psychology and behavioral economics. He ran it for nine years and sold it to Zinnia in 2021. Then he took what he'd learned about how people actually interact with insurance (reluctantly, late, usually after something went wrong) and applied it to the employer benefits market at scale.

The career path before Life.io tells you something about how Cooper approaches complexity. He started in strategy consulting at Oliver Wyman. Moved into corporate development and operations at WellCare. Joined TriZetto as Chief of Staff, where he played a key role during the company's $2.7 billion acquisition by Cognizant. Then he spent time at CodeRyte before deciding to build something from scratch.

He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and holds an MBA from Wharton. He speaks English, French, and Spanish. His morning routine: espresso, cold showers, and sunlight. The man runs a company that helps employees manage stress while apparently stress-testing himself with ice water before 8am.

Quick Facts

Current Role
Co-founder & CEO, Overalls
Education
MBA, Wharton School | BA, Univ. of Pennsylvania
Previous Company
Life.io (founded 2012, sold to Zinnia 2021)
Location
New York, New York
Languages
English, French, Spanish
Morning Routine
Espresso + cold shower + sunlight

Industry Focus

Insurtech Employee Benefits HR Tech Behavioral Insurance AI + Human Concierge Services Work-Life Balance B2B SaaS Fintech Employee Wellbeing
Key Recognition
Fast Company's World's Most Innovative Companies 2026
#7 in Workplace Category + Small & Mighty recognition

LifeConcierge: Your employer's best hire

Overalls pairs AI with actual human specialists across three service pillars. Each covers a different kind of crisis - the logistical, the milestone, and the financial.

⚙️

Hassle Helpers

Personal task management and life admin support. Passport renewals, home repairs, pet emergencies, travel planning. The stuff that eats Tuesday afternoons.

🎯

Mighty Moments

Support during major life events - new babies, eldercare coordination, special needs caregiving, estate planning. The moments when people need a hand, not a hotline.

💰

Pocketbook Protector

Personalized portfolio of insurance and financial products. Medical billing navigation, insurance claims support, financial planning. The part of benefits that nobody reads until they need it.

3.2h
Unlocked per employee per week
80+
NPS Score
72%
Lower stress in 30 days
12%
Team output increase per quarter
3x
Higher engagement than traditional EAPs

From consulting rooms to the insurtech frontier

Cooper's path ran through strategy consulting, healthcare M&A, a $2.7B acquisition, and two companies he built from scratch. The throughline: insurance, benefits, and the behavioral gap between what people need and what they actually use.

Early Career
Strategy consultant at Oliver Wyman - the kind of job that teaches you how broken industries work before you fix them.
Mid-2000s
Corporate Development and Operations roles at WellCare, building operational expertise inside a major health insurance company.
~2011-2014
Chief of Staff at TriZetto. Played a key role in the company's $2.7B acquisition by Cognizant - his first front-row seat to what scale looks like.
2012
Founded Life.io - a behavioral insurance platform using social psychology to drive customer engagement. Ran it for nine years.
2021
Sold Life.io to Zinnia. In the same breath, co-founded Overalls with Emily Johnson and David Pass.
June 2022
Overalls closes $4.6M seed round led by RPM Ventures. Notable angel: former NFL linebacker Jerod Mayo.
Sept 2024
Additional $1.5M funding round. Total raised: $15.8M across 6 rounds.
2026
Fast Company names Overalls #7 on World's Most Innovative Companies list, Workplace category. Small and Mighty recognition for lean-team outsized impact.

"Innovation is the best way to change a system, in large part because it's fueled by curiosity."

- Jon Cooper

The Co-Founders

Emily Johnson
Chief Product Officer. Princeton BA, Minnesota MFA. Third employee at AppNexus. Founded Tutorlist. Product leadership at Haven Life, Fabric, Dayforward.
David Pass
Head of Revenue. Former VP of Healthcare Investment Banking at Jefferies. Advised on $25B+ in M&A. Incubated Overalls inside Redesign Health.

Advisors & Investors

Laurie Ann Goldman - Former CEO of Avon and Spanx
John Geyer - Ex-MetLife Chief Innovation Officer
Missy Krasner - Google Health founding team
Jerod Mayo - Former NFL linebacker; angel investor
RPM Ventures - Lead seed investor
Contour Venture Partners
Declaration Partners

How Cooper runs the show

Every two weeks at Overalls, the entire company gathers for "show and tell." Every employee - not just customer-facing roles - shadows a LifeConcierge, watching how the service handles real user problems. Cooper built this practice into the operating rhythm deliberately. When everyone understands the actual challenge on the other end of the product, the quality of work changes.

Cooper talks about professional development the way engineers talk about technical debt: ignore it and it compounds. "If the business is not benefiting from CPD, that is a signal that either the quality or the focus of the CPD is inadequate." His approach to AI training follows the same logic - upskilling for adaptability rather than replacing roles.

When Overalls was in its first 100 days, early investor responses ranged from "talk to me in six months" to genuine curiosity. The pivot came from listening closely to that feedback - refining the positioning until the product matched what buyers actually needed to hear. The early "no" was part of the research.

"When people feel valued and supported, it shows in the quality of their work."

- Jon Cooper

Glassdoor reviews describe the Overalls culture in terms that match Cooper's stated values: trusted to do your best work, managers who are respectful and quick to praise, real flexibility. For a company whose product is literally about reducing employee stress, an internally stressed team would be a very obvious contradiction.

Company Culture Signals
Biweekly company-wide "show and tell" sessions
All employees shadow LifeConcierges
Unlimited PTO + flexible remote options
Transparency as a default - not a value on a slide
AI training investment for workforce adaptability
Compliance Stack
SOC 2 Type II certified
HIPAA compliant
GDPR compliant
CCPA compliant
Multi-channel: SMS · Web · Email · Phone · Slack · Teams

The $#it Happens Moment

Laurie Ann Goldman ran Spanx. Before that, she ran Avon. She knows how to sell things people didn't know they needed. When she joined Overalls' advisory board, she taught Cooper something that stuck: the words you choose matter as much as the idea behind them.

The tagline "$#it happens" was a bet that enterprise buyers - usually a conservative audience - would respond better to honesty than to corporate-speak. They did. HR teams who had sat through a hundred EAP pitches using words like "holistic wellness journey" lit up when Overalls said, essentially: look, life gets messy. Let us handle the mess.

That's not a marketing trick. It's a product thesis. If you acknowledge the problem clearly enough, the solution sells itself.

$#it
Happens
Overalls Tagline
Inspired by Laurie Ann Goldman, former CEO of Spanx & Avon

Jon Cooper in conversation

Podcast Appearances

In the news

BusinessWire
Insurtech Overalls Secures $4.6M in Funding to Pioneer Behavioral Insurance
Redesign Health
10 Questions with Jon Cooper, CEO of Overalls
ValiantCEO
Jon Cooper of Overalls Inc.: Evolving Leadership Strategies for a Flexible Workplace
Authority Magazine
Jon Cooper of Overalls on the Benefits of Continuous Professional Development
Frontier Venture Capital
Jon Cooper of Overalls Inc.: Leadership Strategies for a Flexible Workplace

The details

Former NFL linebacker Jerod Mayo is a seed investor in Overalls. The connection: everyone needs benefits that work when things go sideways.
Cooper is trilingual - English, French, Spanish. The product concept of removing stress from daily life translates easily across all three.
Overalls was incubated inside Redesign Health before spinning out as an independent company - giving it a head start on infrastructure and network.
Overalls achieves an 80+ NPS. For context: Apple typically scores around 72. This is an employee benefit, not a consumer tech product.
Morning routine: espresso, cold shower, sunlight. The man who runs a company about reducing stress starts every day with deliberate discomfort.

Find Jon Cooper and Overalls