What it is
Ravio is a compensation benchmarking platform that reads salary, equity, variable pay and benefits straight out of its customers’ HR systems and turns them into live market benchmarks. It replaces the annual salary survey, where the data is 12-18 months old by the time you price an offer, with a dataset that updates as employees join, leave or get raised. Ravio’s pricing page counts 1,600+ contributing companies, 618,000+ total-reward data points, 300+ roles and 50+ countries. On top of the benchmarks sit two paid extensions: Bands (build, share and refresh salary bands) and Pay equity (adjusted and unadjusted gender pay gaps, root-cause analysis, EU Pay Transparency Directive reporting metrics).
The question it answers for a recruiting team: what do we pay this candidate, and can we defend the number to the candidate, the hiring manager and, now, a regulator?
The company was founded in London in 2022. It raised a $10M seed led by Northzone, then a $12M Series A led by Spark Capital in May 2025, when it reported 400% ARR growth over the prior twelve months and about 1,200 customers. Customers include Wise, Adyen, Mollie, Bolt, Octopus Energy and Skyscanner.
Why it shows up in recruiting stacks
Two reasons. First, offer pricing: a recruiter sending an offer in Amsterdam or Berlin needs a current number for that role and level, and a stale survey is how offers get declined (see offer acceptance rate). Second, pay transparency. The EU directive requires employers to give candidates a pay range before the interview and bans asking about salary history. Member states had until 7 June 2026 to transpose it. Most missed that date: only Italy, Slovakia, Lithuania and Malta were on time, and the Netherlands moved its start to 1 January 2027. Under the directive’s text, the first gender pay gap reports from employers with 150+ staff are due by 7 June 2027, covering 2026. The deadlines are slipping, but the obligations are coming either way, and published ranges need benchmarks behind them.
Ravio’s integration list covers the ATS side too: Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, SmartRecruiters, Teamtailor and Workday Recruiting, plus Personio, HiBob, BambooHR, Workday, ADP Workforce Now and Deel on the HRIS side, and Carta and Ledgy for equity.
Pricing reality
Ravio publishes no prices. The contract terms it does publish matter more: annual billing only, no monthly option, and data contribution is mandatory. You connect your HRIS or upload data, and it feeds the pooled benchmark. That is the give-to-get model that keeps the data fresh.
hr.software lists a starting price of £5,000 a year for a 500-person company, with Bands and Pay equity priced as add-ons. The trial is three free benchmarks, not a free tier. For comparison, Vendr’s buyer data puts Pave at $15,000-45,000 a year for companies with 100-500 employees, with a $36,000 median across 111 Pave deals. At that size Ravio’s entry price is less than half of Pave’s low end. Budget the add-ons in from day one if EU reporting is the driver, because the core benchmarks alone do not produce the reports.
Best for
People, total rewards and TA operations leads at European tech companies with 100 to 2,000 employees, hiring across several EU countries. The job is setting salary bands, pricing offers against current market data and getting pay-gap reporting ready for the directive. It is the right pick when your HRIS is Personio, HiBob or BambooHR and your competitors for talent are other scale-ups.
Do not buy it if you are a US-only company, a company under about 50 employees, or outside tech. Ravio only started adding US benchmarks in January 2024, beginning with base salary across US pay zones, and its contributor base is still mostly European. Its peer set is weighted toward venture-backed tech, and a hospital group or manufacturer will find thin matches.
Versus the alternatives
Aon Radford and Mercer are the two largest salary-survey providers that tech and enterprise compensation teams buy from. Pick them when your board’s compensation committee or auditors expect a named survey house, when you benchmark executives, or when you are a non-tech enterprise. You trade freshness for defensibility: survey data is aged forward, participation is a yearly submission exercise, and multi-country access costs more than Ravio’s entry tier.
Pave is the fastest-growing real-time rival. It has 9,000+ companies on its platform, a free Market Data Lite tier and, since August 2026, an expanded Pave Agent that reasons across merit cycles, pay ranges and job-posting data. Pick Pave when your company is US-headquartered, your equity program matters as much as base pay, or you also want merit-cycle planning in the same tool. Pick Ravio when most of your headcount is in Europe.
Figures is the closest European analogue. It is Paris-based, with salary bands, pay gap reporting and review cycles. Shortlist it next to Ravio if France is your largest market, and let peer-set coverage for your roles decide.
Watch-outs
- Give-to-get means your pay data leaves your building. Contribution is a contract term, not a setting. Guard: get the data protection agreement to works councils and your DPO before signing. In Germany and the Netherlands, check whether the HRIS connection triggers co-determination rights, and confirm the anonymization threshold in writing.
- Your HRIS is not necessarily on the live list. Rippling, Gusto, Zoho People and iCIMS are listed as “coming soon”, and without a live integration, benchmarks go stale at the speed of your manual uploads. Guard: confirm a live connector for your exact HRIS and ATS during the trial, and if you use SFTP or upload, contract a monthly refresh owner.
- Market levels are not work of equal value. Ravio maps roles to its own level framework for market matching. The directive’s pay-gap categories rest on a gender-neutral assessment of skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions, which is a different exercise. Guard: document an equal-value job evaluation separately, with employment counsel, before you file the Pay equity module’s output as your Article 9 report.
- Thin cells look like data. Niche roles and smaller countries have few data points, and G2 reviewers name coverage gaps for specific roles and countries. Guard: read the confidence rating and sample size Ravio has shown on every benchmark since February 2026, and do not publish a candidate-facing range from a low-confidence benchmark without a second source.