Warren Raises €10M to Fix Belgium’s Broken Workplace Pensions

A Belgian worker who clocks 40 years on the job retires, on average, with a supplementary pension worth less than a second-hand car. That’s not a metaphor — it’s the median outcome for employees aged 56 to 65 in Belgium’s second pillar, where reserves sit below €10,000. Warren, a Ghent-based fintech founded in 2024, wants to break that pattern, and it’s just raised €10 million in seed funding to do it.

The round, announced this week, was led by Motive Ventures, the venture arm of transatlantic investment firm Motive Partners, with F Capital joining as a new backer alongside returning investors Entourage, Syndicate One, and 100IN. It follows a €3 million pre-seed raise in March 2025 — putting Warren’s total funding north of €13 million in just over a year.

The Macro Picture: A Pension System Running on Borrowed Time

Belgium’s pension architecture rests on three pillars: a state pension, an employer-sponsored “second pillar” of occupational plans, and voluntary private savings. The first pillar is doing nearly all the work. According to the OECD, Belgians depend on the state pension for 85% of their monthly retirement income, compared with an average of 57% across other developed economies — and the replacement rate it delivers, around 45% of final salary, trails the OECD average of 54%.

That imbalance is becoming harder to sustain. Public pension expenditure is projected to climb from 13.1% of GDP to 15.1% over the next 30 years, a trajectory the OECD ranks as the second-steepest in the bloc after Spain. Belgium’s new “Arizona” coalition government has responded with a pledge to guarantee employer contributions of at least 3% to workplace pensions for all employees by 2035 — an acknowledgment that the second pillar can no longer be left to drift.

Warren isn’t a broker or an advisory layer bolted onto existing insurers. It operates its own licensed pension fund, investing employer and employee contributions directly into a diversified portfolio of low-cost ETFs — with no entry fees, no asset-based management fees, and no hidden commissions.

That structural choice is the company’s central pitch. Most workplace pension reserves in Belgium sit inside Branch 21 group insurance contracts — products that guarantee a nominal return but, after fees and inflation, frequently erode real purchasing power over a multi-decade horizon. Warren’s founders, led by CEO Cedric De Vleeschauwer, argue this is the quiet mechanism behind the country’s threadbare second-pillar outcomes.

• Flat subscription pricing: Employers pay a fixed fee rather than a percentage of assets under management, so returns compound without being skimmed year after year.
• Full fee transparency: No layered commissions embedded in the underlying insurance wrapper.
• Financial coaching built in: The platform pairs pension administration with employee-facing financial education, addressing what the company calls a literacy gap as much as a savings gap.

In its first year of commercial operation, Warren says it has signed roughly 100 Belgian companies, building toward a stated target of 100,000 employees on the platform by 2028. The new capital will fund close to thirty additional hires on top of the 25-person team already in place — and lay groundwork for expansion into one or two further European markets once Belgium is consolidated.

Is the Second Pillar Pension Adequate in Belgium?

Belgium’s second-pillar pension is not adequate by international standards: the median reserve for workers aged 56–65 sits under €10,000, the state pension covers 85% of retirement income versus a 57% OECD average, and statutory replacement rates lag the OECD norm of 54%.

A €10 million seed round is modest by fintech standards. What makes it notable is the regulatory vacuum Warren is stepping into. In the UK, where comparable players like Penfold and Smart Pension operate, workplace pension participation is mandatory under auto-enrolment law — Penfold raised €4.6 million in May 2025 and grew its employer base from 1,200 to over 4,000 companies inside roughly eighteen months, while Smart Pension secured a €69.4 million credit facility to scale within that same compulsory framework.

Belgium has no equivalent mandate yet. The Arizona coalition’s 3% employer-contribution pledge is a policy direction, not enacted law, and its 2035 horizon leaves nearly a decade of voluntary adoption ahead. Warren is effectively betting that it can build category leadership before the rules force employers to act — a higher-risk, higher-reward sequencing than its UK peers ever had to attempt. If the mandate eventually arrives, first-mover platforms stand to inherit the compliance wave; if it stalls, growth depends entirely on employers choosing better pensions voluntarily, which is a slower and less certain path.

The downstream effects of this round extend beyond one company’s balance sheet. Three groups have a direct stake in what Warren does with its new capital.

For employers, particularly SMEs that have historically defaulted to whichever insurer their broker recommended, Warren’s flat-fee model creates a price comparison point that didn’t really exist before. Belgium’s tax treatment of second-pillar contributions — contributions taxed at 4.4%, with employer contributions subject to 8.86% social security and an extra 3% levy above roughly €37,872 a year — already shapes how generous employers can afford to be. A platform that strips out asset-based fees changes the net return calculation without touching that tax framework at all.

For employees, the gender dimension is hard to ignore. Belgium’s gender pension gap stood at 31% in 2024, well above the OECD average of 23%, driven partly by lower participation in occupational schemes among women in part-time or interrupted careers. Whether Warren’s coaching layer meaningfully narrows that gap, or simply digitizes the existing disparity, is a question the company hasn’t yet had to answer at scale.

For the broader fintech market, Warren’s raise lands alongside a wave of pension-adjacent funding across Europe — evidence that investors increasingly see retirement infrastructure, not just retirement advice, as the more durable wedge. Expect more entrants to test Belgium’s pre-mandate window over the next 18 months.

Not everyone is convinced that a fintech wrapper solves a structural problem. Critics of the “fee disruption” narrative point out that Branch 21 products exist precisely because they guarantee capital — a feature some risk-averse savers, particularly those nearing retirement, value more than upside potential. Stripping out guarantees in favor of ETF exposure shifts market risk onto the employee, and a downturn in the years immediately before retirement could leave a worker worse off than under a low-yield but capital-protected scheme.

There’s also the adoption question. Belgium’s pension brokers and incumbent insurers have decades of employer relationships, and switching providers involves real administrative friction — works council consultations, collective labor agreements, and union sign-off in many sectors. A flat-fee pitch is compelling on a spreadsheet; it still has to survive a slower, more political procurement process than consumer fintech is used to.

That tension — between the speed startups want and the consensus-building Belgian labor relations require — may end up shaping Warren’s growth curve more than its product does.

Warren’s €10 million says less about the appetite for pension fintech than it does about how exposed Belgium’s second pillar has become. The numbers — a median reserve under €10,000, an 85% reliance on a state system already absorbing a growing share of GDP — aren’t new, and they haven’t moved much despite years of warnings from pension bodies like PensioPlus. What’s changed is that a venture-backed company is now betting real capital on the idea that fixing the product, not just waiting for the mandate, is where the leverage actually sits.

Whether that bet pays off will be decided less in a pitch deck than in thousands of quiet HR meetings across Belgium over the next few years.