Google Capital, Google Inc.’s equity growth fund, has invested $32.5 million in Oscar Health Insurance Corp., the startup venture looking to disrupt the health insurance market, according to a new article in The Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt from the Sept. 15 article by Douglas MacMillen:
Insurance startup Oscar Health Insurance Corp. has a powerful new ally in its costly battle to win customers from entrenched insurance giants like UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Anthem Inc.
Google Capital, the Internet company’s growth-equity fund, has invested $32.5 million in Oscar, the startup said in an interview. The deal values two-year-old Oscar at $1.75 billion, up from a valuation of $1.5 billion when it last took funding in April, said a person familiar with the transaction.
Oscar has amassed a considerable war chest of more than $350 million in its bid to use data and technology to make the insurance business work more like an Internet service. More than 40,000 patients have signed up in New York and New Jersey, Oscar’s first and only markets so far, and the company plans to open its service to users in California and Texas at the beginning of next year.
Mario Schlosser, who co-founded Oscar in 2012, said part of his goal is to help fuel the adoption of new healthcare technologies developed by other companies. Google, whose Life Sciences arm is jointly developing a contact lens with pharmaceutical company Novartis AG that monitors glucose levels from human tears, could eventually work with Oscar to help distribute these types of new medical products to patients, Mr. Schlosser said.
• Read the entire Wall Street Journal article here.
• See also: Lumity raises $14M to crunch data and devise better health insurance plans for companies
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