Main Highlights
- Connie Health announced that it has secured $13 million in Series A investment led by Khosla Ventures and Pitango Healthtech, bringing its total capital to $16 million.
- The company’s technology considers the providers someone sees, the drugs they are on, and the perks they would want to have.
- The fresh funds will also allow the firm to diversify into other insurance products.
- The Medicare Advantage area is robust and will continue to grow.
Employers generally provide three healthcare insurance choices. When it comes time to transfer to Medicare, particularly Medicare Advantage, there are over 3,500 plans available countrywide, with an average of 30 options accessible in each location.
Connie Health guides seniors navigate the Medicare maze, narrowing down the 3,000 plans to a handful of top options depending on care needs. The company’s three co-founders, CEO Oded Eran, Chief Revenue Officer David Luna, and Chief Growth Officer Michael Scopa, witnessed this situation personally as executives at Iora Health, which is being bought by OneMedical for $2.1 billion.
They founded their firm in 2019 with the goal of creating a Medicare concierge service to help seniors simply navigate between the 30 Medicare plans to discover the best one for them.
How was the idea of launching this start-up coined?
“We came from the provider side and saw that even while healthcare is local, consumers don’t know the difference between hospitals or the ins and outs of local networks,” Eran explained. “Seniors require trust there, and when there are local experts available to meet over the phone or at their home, you earn that trust.”
The Boston-based firm said Wednesday that it has secured $13 million in Series A investment led by Khosla Ventures and Pitango Healthtech, bringing its total capital to $16 million. In January 2020, the business secured $3 million in a seed round led by Khosla.
AbstractVentures, Dynamic Loop Capital, Arkitekt Ventures, and a collection of angel investors, including Hippo Insurance CEO Assaf Wand and Flatiron Health founders Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner, also participated in the seed and Series A rounds.
With 55 million Medicare beneficiaries benefiting from significant innovation in Medicare Advantage and value-based care, Samir Kaul, founding general partner at Khosla Ventures, identified a big industry being disrupted by Connie Health. He was particularly pleased with Eran’s team and the company’s ability to debut amid the epidemic while remaining agile.
“The Medicare Advantage area is robust and will continue to grow,” noted Kaul. “Technology has not played a significant role here, and Oded intends to introduce technology to make the market more efficient.”
Advantages of using this insurance
Medicare Advantage is the insurance program’s private market component. Eran stated that the government is attempting to encourage competition and innovation, thus there are many new players entering to offer additional plan alternatives, nuances, and to help better control costs. This causes a lot of uncertainty among consumers, he adds.
Customers have a difficult time deciding on the latest and best alternatives, so they tend to remain with the status quo. That is when Connie Health enters the picture. The company’s technology considers the providers someone sees, the drugs they are on, and the perks they would want to have, feeds those into its model, and then sifts through the hundreds of available plans to propose the best fit.
Connie Health launched its consumer platform in Arizona in October 2020, and with the additional financing, it also began operations in Texas. Eran plans to relocate to Illinois in the coming year, where he expects to witness significant demographic shifts as people migrate to Medicare and other states.
The fresh funds will also allow the firm to diversify into other insurance products. Within those states, the firm expanded its reach to seven markets, and its local agent base increased 15 times.
“We are going to democratize access to local agents to assist people in making these often difficult decisions and finding healthcare that they deserve and have paid for their whole working lives,” Eran added. “We are taking a market-by-market approach because healthcare is a communal concern.”