An Austin insurer with one strange demand: see a doctor once a year, and you will never see a copay again.
Walk into an open-enrollment meeting at a Texas company in 2026 and someone will say the line that sounds too good to be true: no copays, no deductibles, nothing out of pocket for in-network care. The skeptics in the room fold their arms. There is always a catch. With Curative, there is - and it is the most interesting thing about the company.
The catch is that you have to use it. Complete one annual preventive appointment, the Baseline Visit, and the plan zeroes out your cost-sharing for the rest of the year. Skip it, and the math gets ordinary again. Curative did not just lower the price of healthcare. It moved the price tag to the one thing most insurers can barely get members to do: show up before something goes wrong.
Today Curative is a licensed, AM Best-rated carrier covering more than 165,000 members across 1,200-plus employers, headquartered on Congress Avenue in downtown Austin. In December 2025 it raised a $150 million Series B and crossed a valuation near $1.3 billion. For a company that did not sell a single insurance plan until 2022, that is a quick trip from idea to unicorn.
Here is the quiet absurdity of American health coverage: you can be fully insured and still avoid the doctor because you cannot face the deductible. High-deductible plans were sold as a way to make consumers smarter shoppers. Mostly they made people gamblers, betting they would stay healthy enough to never hit the threshold.
The result is a system where the financially rational move is to delay care until a small problem becomes an expensive one. Curative's founders looked at that and saw a design flaw, not a fact of life. The deductible was not protecting anyone. It was a tollbooth on the road to the very preventive care that keeps costs down for everyone.
So the question Curative asked was deliberately naive: what if the plan removed the tollbooth entirely, and instead made the annual checkup the price of entry? Charge one predictable premium. Reward the behavior you actually want. Let people use the coverage they are already paying for.
Curative was founded in 2020 by Fred Turner, Isaac Turner (no relation), and Vlad Slepnev. The original plan was diagnostics for sepsis. Then a pandemic arrived, and within weeks the company re-tooled into one of the largest COVID-19 testing operations in the country - at its peak processing close to 10% of all US tests and running thousands of testing sites.
It would have been easy to ride that wave until it crashed. Instead, as testing demand fell, the founders made a decision that looked reckless from the outside: walk away from the business that made them famous and build a health insurance company from scratch. Fred Turner, a Forbes "30 Under 30" honoree who had launched venture-backed biotech startups before he could legally rent a car, framed it as building the plan he would want for his own family.
Started to build sepsis diagnostics, then pivoted in weeks to large-scale COVID-19 testing with an oral-swab assay under FDA Emergency Use Authorization.
Operated thousands of testing sites, processed a meaningful share of US tests, and won awards including Medtech Breakthrough's Best Medtech Startup.
Launched the Curative Health Plan - a no copay, no deductible employer plan built around the annual Baseline Visit.
Expanded the $0 copay / $0 deductible plan into Georgia, adding to a footprint anchored in Texas and Florida.
Launched Curative Telehealth, renewed its AM Best A- rating for a third year, made Fast Company's most-innovative healthcare list, and closed a $150M Series B.
Enters the year valued at roughly $1.3 billion, with 165,000+ members and an expansion plan aimed beyond its home states.
Curative sells employer health plans for groups of 51 or more, in both fully-insured and level-funded flavors. The headline benefit is simple to the point of being suspicious: $0 copays, $0 deductibles, and $0 out-of-pocket costs for in-network care, all gated behind that one annual Baseline Visit. Around that sits the unglamorous machinery that makes it real.
A single monthly premium with no copays, deductibles, or coinsurance for in-network care - once the member completes their Baseline Visit.
A no-cost annual preventive appointment that unlocks zero out-of-pocket benefits and routes members toward primary care early.
Integrated pharmacy with a large formulary and delivery, with covered medications at $0 cost inside the plan.
Virtual primary and urgent care, launched in 2025, extending access to providers and navigators across many states.
Dedicated navigators help members find in-network providers, book appointments, and dodge surprise bills.
A plan that sounds too good invites one question: is anyone buying it, and does it hold up? The numbers say yes on both counts. Membership and employer adoption have climbed fast, and - the detail that separates Curative from most health startups - it operates as a licensed carrier with an investment-grade-style financial rating from AM Best, renewed three years in a row.
The receipts go beyond the balance sheet. Curative partnered with Two Chairs to widen access to behavioral and mental health care, runs its operations on the HealthEdge core administration platform, and earned a spot on Fast Company's most-innovative-in-healthcare list for 2025. Its pandemic-era credibility was built on federal contracts, including work with the US Department of Defense.
Curative's stated mission is to remove the financial barriers - copays, deductibles, surprise bills - that stop people from getting care. Read it twice and you notice it is not really about insurance. It is about behavior. The company's whole thesis is that if you make preventive care free and obvious, people will use it, and a healthier member base is a cheaper one to insure.
That is an old idea in health policy that almost nobody has been able to operationalize at the level of a real, rated carrier. Curative's wager is that the way to fix the incentive is not a white paper but a product - one where the cheapest path for the member and the cheapest path for the insurer finally point in the same direction.
Go back to that conference room. The arms uncross slowly. Someone asks the navigator to find their kid's pediatrician in the network, and it is free. Someone else realizes the prescription they have been rationing is covered at zero. The catch turned out to be a checkup, and the checkup turned out to be the point.
Curative is still mostly a Texas, Florida, and Georgia story, with telehealth reaching further and an expansion map pointed at new states. The hard questions remain: can the $0 model survive a recession, sicker risk pools, and the gravity of an industry that has swallowed reformers before? Nobody knows yet. But the company has already done the thing most health startups never manage - it turned a slogan into a licensed, rated, growing insurer.
If it works at national scale, the legacy will not be a clever benefit design. It will be a simple, stubborn proof: that a health plan can make money by getting people to the doctor early, instead of betting they never go. That is the scene Curative is trying to change - one open-enrollment meeting at a time.