Fresh off generating $180 million in a new funding round, the HealthCare.com team is said it is “committed to changing the U.S. consumer’s relationship to their healthcare, creating solutions that make it easy to discover, choose, buy and use health insurance and other healthcare-related products across every life-stage.”
New York City and Miami-based HealthCare.com, a data-driven insurtech platform, announced this week the closing of $130 million in Senior Non-Convertible Preferred and more than $50 million of Series C Preferred equity in an oversubscribed round led by funds managed by Oaktree Capital Management, L.P. (“Oaktree”). Existing investors Axis Capital, Second Alpha and Link Ventures participated in the financing, as did founders.
“We are thrilled to partner with premier investors who recognize that HealthCare.com is positioned for its next phase of explosive growth,” said Don Loonam, CEO of HealthCare.com. “There is a crisis of cost, transparency and access stemming from complexity and a slow pace of change in healthcare and health insurance. The consumer is at the center of our offering, and our ultimate product is their end-to-end healthcare experience. We aim to create an iterative relationship with the consumer that will span decades, improving lifelong wellness.”
Leveraging its deep data assets and AI algorithms, HealthCare.com said it matches individuals to an increasingly wide array of products in the healthcare space, including its own proprietary insurance plans and customizable insurance product bundles.
The data-driven platform includes multi-product purchase options in one single transaction. As a result, the company is growing rapidly. In the last year the company said it has helped millions of people connect to a healthcare product and consistent improvements in consumer experience have resulted in direct-to-consumer enrollments up 97% in 2021.
“HealthCare.com is changing consumer behavior by disrupting the U.S. healthcare markets, creating new products and efficiencies with the objective of empowering consumers,” said Oaktree’s Brian Laibow. “Oaktree is excited to partner with the HealthCare.com team to continue scaling the company in its next phase of growth.”
“We’ve partnered with HealthCare.com since 2016 and have witnessed the company’s tremendous growth over the last couple of years,” added AXIS Capital’s Linda Ventresca. “The company’s ability to rapidly develop new proprietary insurance products and its innovative distribution model, along with its ability to quickly scale with the use of technology, allows it to solve complex challenges in the health insurance ecosystem.”
The company plans to accelerate its investment in data science, product development, and engineering and will also hire for several key roles as it works to close the gap between healthcare consumers’ needs and their access to the best options.
HealthCare.com’s distributed workforce of more than 370 employees has increased 130% since January 2021. The team is based in more than 15 states, as well as Guatemala, Thailand, and the Netherlands.
The original co-founders of HealthCare.com, including Jeff Smedsrud, Jose Vargas and Howard Yeh all remain active in senior leadership roles within the company. In conjunction with the financing round, Brian Laibow, Managing Director and Co-Head of North America for Oaktree’s Global Opportunities strategy, and Linda Ventresca, Chief Strategy Officer for AXIS Capital, a leader in specialty insurance and global reinsurance, have joined the HealthCare.com Board of Directors.
Health care and health care funding is about more than price.
Can a computer be programmed to answer “what if” questions? Can a computer answer questions about claim denials?
Having the ability to write new business while you sleep sounds great, but when it comes to health insurance, many have questions that require 2-way dialogue, not popup robo-assistants who will eventually transfer you to a real person.
To an extent, yes they can. To what extent depends on the depth of programming they have. The tech is still fairly new and it would take a very long time for even a team of people to cover all the variables and answers to all the possibilities.
I played around with an assistant chatbot for my websites once. Given enough time, you could create a very interactive and in-depth experience. The issue is that its just like a website, it takes the knowledge of the agent to create the content needed for a quality site. Same with a chatbot. A computer programmer is only capable of doing so much themselves, mainly customer service/administrative type of tasks. But to answer the real insurance questions, an actual agent has to be heavily involved. That is why so many of the "help bots" are so useless. For an insurance carrier, they would have to cover so much info it would be a multi-year undertaking (Im sure its in the works). For an agent or agency, it would cost a ton of money to hire a programmer to go through all the various Q&As… especially covering all the various follow up questions by the client after the initial answer is given by the bot. Plus all the time invested by the agent to provide the info needed.
At first I thought "this would be easy". Then I realized how many branches each question needs when you get into follow up questions and responses to those. For a single agent it would easily take a years worth of back and forth with a programmer to get a decent product. There are programs that make it easy and you dont have to be an actual programmer, they are pretty easy to figure out, but that is even more time invested.
Give it another 5 or 10 years and I think the tech will be very impressive compared to now. But no getting around the fact that an expert must commit a very large amount of time to provide relevant info. At some point we will probably be able to subscribe to insurance assistants who are preprogrammed for our niche.
I went to their website and went through the process. After answering some basic questions, it generated a listing of policies that would be available to me and that an agent would be contacting me soon.
Let us know which policies you will be buying from HAL 9000 . . .
Give it another 5 or 10 years and I think the tech will be very impressive compared to now.
lol, great movie.
After they burn thru their pile of cash, they will then realize that they need the independent agent distribution channel.