Ex-Mercer CEO Martine Ferland joins Origin as strategic advisor
Enterprise benefits intelligence platform Origin has announced the arrival of Martine Ferland as a strategic advisor to the firm. The former Mercer CEO offers up more than 40 years of experience in global human resources consulting, and will also become an angel investor with the company.
Since formally launching in April 2025, UK-headquartered Origin has raised more than $50 million in funding from investors including Notion Capital, Felix Capital, and Acadian Ventures. Its rapidly growing customer base includes close to forty of the world’s largest multinationals.
“Origin is infrastructure rather than another tool,” Ferland commented. “My job now is to be useful: stress test the growth plan, share my perspectives, and support the team as they build a community excited about using AI to transform the value delivered by their benefit programs.”
For most large organisations, benefits are the second largest people cost after compensation and the only one still managed without a platform of its own. Origin aims to help global benefits teams gain the visibility, intelligence, and governance to lead: every benefit, cost, vendor, and country structured into a single source of truth, AI-powered insights that show where they are overpaying, non-compliant, or missing savings, and governed workflows for renewals, compliance, and vendor management.
Ferland brings four decades of experience in global benefits and human resources consulting to help that charge. That includes five years leading Mercer, the world’s largest HR consulting firm. She currently serves on the boards of WSP Global and the Adecco Group.
She added, “Early in my career, one of my largest financial services clients asked me to document and rationalize their benefits across 120 countries. We did it by hand. It took the better part of two years, and by the time we finished, it needed doing again. That problem never got solved in the four decades since. When I started discussing with Chris what he and Pete are building at Origin, I could not find a more natural application of AI anywhere.”
Ferland has known Origin’s co-founders, Chris Bruce and Pete Craghill, since Mercer acquired Darwin (formerly Thomsons Online Benefits). She worked closely to integrate the global benefits technology company which Craghill and Bruce founded and led into Mercer, in the years that followed.
“Martine is one of the most credible figures in our industry, and she has lived this problem from every side of it,” said Chris Bruce, co-founder and CEO of Origin. “Her counsel will be invaluable as we scale the platform, deepen our HCM integrations, and grow our ecosystem of brokers, consultants, insurers, and point solutions.”
