What it is
Compa is a compensation intelligence platform for enterprise compensation and talent acquisition teams. It pulls pay data straight from its customers’ HCM, ATS and stock administration systems, pools it into a live market dataset, and returns benchmarks for salary, incentives and equity. Its site counts more than 1.2 million offer records, 4.8 million employee records and 1.2 million equity grants across 40-plus countries, which the company rolls up as 9 million market observations. The category leader it most resembles is Pave; the product it is built to replace is the annual salary survey.
The distinguishing dataset is Offers: what peer companies actually extended to candidates, not what their employees earn today. For a recruiter that is the number that matters, because an offer is priced against other offers.
Compa was founded in 2020 in Newport Beach, California. CEO Charlie Franklin started his career at Mercer and later ran HR M&A at Workday. The company raised a $10M Series A in January 2024 and a $35M Series B on 26 January 2026, led by Jump Capital with Crosslink Capital, Storm Ventures and HR Tech Investments (an Indeed affiliate) participating. Public logos include HubSpot, Stripe, Synopsys and Micron, and OpenAI’s director of compensation is quoted in the Series B announcement.
Why it shows up in recruiting stacks
Finalists are lost at the offer stage when the recruiter prices against a survey aged forward from last year’s data, and the gap shows up in offer acceptance rate. Compa attacks that in two layers. The Offers dataset gives a monthly view of peer offers, and Compa pitches tracking your acceptance and decline rates against the market. On top of it, Partner Agent is aimed at recruiters: it drafts offers and talking points, applies your ranges, geo rules and equity guidelines, auto-approves in-policy offers and routes exceptions to the comp team with documentation. Analyst Agent does the market analysis for the comp team itself. Both are reachable through Compa Connect in Slack, Claude or over MCP.
Two partnerships make it the enterprise-shaped option. Workday certified Compa’s HCM integration in July 2025 and invited it into its AI Agent Partner Network. On 13 August 2026 Mercer announced an alliance that puts Mercer compensation insights inside Analyst Agent, so a comp committee that still wants a named survey house can get both sources in one interface. On the ATS side, Greenhouse is the connector Compa names publicly; Oracle, Carta and E*TRADE appear on the HCM and stock side.
Pricing reality
Unusually for this category, Compa publishes floors. Research (market indices and analyst commentary, no peer benchmarks) starts at $15,000 a year. Live Market Data starts at $35,000 a year and covers employee benchmarks plus Research. Offers, Stock, Skills and Frontline are add-ons on top of that, at unpublished prices. Intelligence, which is the tier that unlocks Analyst Agent, Partner Agent, MCP and Slack access, is quote-only. Billing is annual, with multi-year discounts and pilot pricing on request.
The tier a TA team actually needs is Live Market Data plus the Offers add-on, and Intelligence if recruiters are meant to use the agent. That puts the realistic entry point above $35,000 a year before the add-on (estimate from the published floors). For scale, Vendr’s buyer data across 254 Pave purchases shows a $36,150 median, and $15,000-45,000 a year for companies with 100-500 employees. Compa’s floor sits at Pave’s median, so it only pays off for companies large enough to use the enterprise features.
Best for
Compensation and TA operations leads at enterprises with roughly 2,000+ employees, heavy US hiring and equity in the offer, who run Workday or Greenhouse and want recruiters to price offers against peer offers without routing every one through the comp team. It is strongest in tech and semiconductors, where its public logos sit.
Do not buy it if you are under about 500 employees, if most of your hiring is in Europe, or if your offers are cash-only hourly roles and you only need a salary band. The $35,000 floor is most of a small company’s comp budget, and the Offers module is an add-on to that floor, not a standalone product.
Versus the alternatives
Aon Radford and Mercer are the two largest compensation survey providers in tech and enterprise. Pick them when auditors or the board’s compensation committee expect a named survey, or for executive pay. The Mercer alliance means Compa customers can reach Mercer insights through the agent, but confirm what licence that requires.
Pave is the fastest-growing real-time rival, with a free Market Data Lite tier and merit-cycle planning in the same product. Pick Pave if you are a US scale-up under about 1,500 employees, want to start free, or need merit cycles and benchmarks in one tool. Pick Compa if peer offer data and recruiter-facing offer approvals are the job.
Ravio is the pick for European companies with 100-2,000 employees, at a far lower entry price and with EU pay-transparency reporting.
Watch-outs
- Give-to-get: your offer data feeds the network. Compa’s matching documentation says data from your HCM, ATS and stock admin tools contributes to its customer network and comes back as aggregated insight. Guard: before signing, get the anonymisation thresholds and minimum cell sizes in writing, and run the data flow past legal and, in EU entities, the works council.
- Agents that approve offers are spending authority. Partner Agent auto-approves in-policy offers. Guard: start it in recommend-only mode for one job family, audit a quarter of its decisions against comp-team calls, and keep the exception thresholds owned by compensation, not TA.
- The Mercer data may not be included. The August 2026 announcement does not say whether Mercer insights need a separate Mercer licence. Guard: make the Mercer data scope and cost a line item in the order form.
- Add-ons stack up. The published $35,000 floor excludes Offers, the module recruiters need. Guard: price Offers and Intelligence in the first quote and get a multi-year cap on escalation.