North Coast Ventures Insights

Why We Invested: Healia

Written by North Coast Ventures | 10/18/24 1:20 PM

North Coast Ventures recently made a seed-stage investment in Healia Health, an AI-powered platform helping families eliminate out-of-pocket healthcare costs while enabling massive cost savings for employers. Healia addresses a critical problem impacting over 20 million U.S. households - even with health insurance through employers, dual-income families still face significant medical bills and out-of-pocket expenses. Healia's innovative technology analyzes a household's full suite of health plans to maximize coverage across both employer policies.

A core part of Healia's solution is their novel Total Care Option (TCO) offering. With TCO, an employee uses their spouse's policy as the primary plan while their own employer policy covers the entire family's out-of-pocket costs like deductibles and co-pays. This revolutionary approach provides first-dollar, comprehensive coverage with $0 out-of-pocket costs for doctor visits, procedures, prescriptions, and more.

Healia was founded by Priyang Shah, who brings deep expertise in healthcare and insurance from leadership roles at companies like Root Insurance, which he helped scale to over 1,500 employees and an IPO. As a former director at Olive AI, a $4 billion AI healthcare company, Priyang built core provider offerings and has a proven track record optimizing products for both B2B and B2C audiences.

Healia's AI personalizes this intelligent benefits coordination for each family member based on their circumstances and health needs. By ensuring people access the highest quality, most cost-effective care pathways, Healia delivers an incredible employee benefit while achieving drastic cost reductions for employers. For a typical company with 1,000 employees, Healia can reduce per-enrolled family healthcare exposure by 90% - translating into over $1 million in savings with just 20% workforce enrollment.

The health tech company recently showcased the significant financial advantages of its Total Care Option (TCO) through a case study involving a leading technology company in the Bay Area. The company, referred by their broker, sought to preserve high-quality employee benefits while addressing rising costs. Through the TCO, the company is now saving $12,100 annually per enrollee, with an impressive projected return of 8.5x on their investment over time. Employees are also benefiting, saving an average of $5,600 annually on healthcare expenses.

Joined by Y-Combinator and others, NCV is tremendously excited to partner with Healia as they continue scaling this game-changing solution across the $631B employer healthcare market.

About North Coast Ventures

North Coast Ventures (NCV) is a Cleveland-based early-stage venture capital firm primarily investing in B2B, SaaS companies. With over 470 member investors, NCV is the largest, single-chapter investor group in the country. Since 2006, NCV and its member investors have deployed more than $100M into over 70 high-potential ventures. For more information about North Coast Ventures and its portfolio, visit northcoast.vc