evermore

A grocery checkout in Bentonville, and a card that knows the difference between kale and candy

Somewhere in America right now, a retiree on Medicare Advantage is sliding a card across a scanner. The lettuce goes through. The cereal goes through. The cigarettes do not. No clerk frowns, no manager is called. The card simply knows which items the plan will cover and which it will not, and it decides in the time it takes the receipt to print.

That quiet moment is the whole company. evermore - the business formerly known as Soda Health - administers what it calls Smart Benefits: supplemental healthcare dollars that used to be a confusing allowance and are now an item-level transaction. It runs across more than 70,000 retail locations, from Kroger and Albertsons to CVS, Hy-Vee, Meijer and Costco. The consumer sees a friendly card branded &more. The plan sees real-time data. evermore sees its reason to exist.

Supplemental benefits grew faster than anyone's ability to spend them well

Health plans love to advertise benefits. A grocery allowance here, an over-the-counter stipend there, a transportation perk for good measure. The catch is unglamorous: a benefit that nobody understands is a benefit nobody uses, and a benefit nobody uses is, generously, an accounting line that helped sell a plan. Less generously, it is a person who skipped the medication because the card was declined at the wrong shelf.

For years the supplemental-benefits market did the thing markets do when growth outpaces discipline - it grew anyway. Plans piled on perks to win members. The plumbing underneath stayed dumb. Cards worked on whole categories or not at all, data arrived months late, and the gap between "benefit offered" and "benefit used" widened into the thing the entire industry politely declined to measure.

Four operators who had watched the problem from the inside

In 2021, Robby Knight left Walmart Health, where he had run consumer health innovation, and started iterating on a concept with people he had been comparing notes with for years. The founding team - Knight, Daryl Risinger, Chris Brown and Jared Dauman - came out of Walmart and Optum, which is to say they had seen both the retail counter and the insurance ledger, and noticed the two never really spoke to each other.

The bet was specific and a little contrarian: that the unit of a benefit should not be a category or a monthly allowance, but a single item at the moment of purchase. Build the system that can say yes or no to one box of cereal in real time, and everything downstream - the data, the reporting, the care-gap work, the trust - follows. They incubated it in Bentonville, Arkansas, of all places, which is either ironic or perfectly logical depending on how you feel about Walmart's hometown becoming a healthtech address.

One card, a great deal of math behind it

What members hold is deceptively simple: a single &more card that works on approved goods and services - healthy food, OTC medications, transportation and more. What sits behind it is the Smart Benefits Operating System, which adjudicates purchases at the item level, in real time, and enforces benefit restrictions down to the SKU. Multiple benefit programs ride on the same card without the member ever having to know which dollar came from which program.

The byproduct is the actual asset: data. Because every approved or declined item is a logged decision, evermore can hand plans transparent reporting and care-gap analytics instead of a quarterly guess. That feeds the unglamorous, money-moving work of closing care gaps and nudging Medicare Star ratings - the numbers that decide how a plan gets paid.

The receipts, literally and otherwise

evermore's case rests less on adjectives than on a few hard numbers. The company closed an oversubscribed $50M Series B in December 2024, led by General Catalyst, with participation from former Humana CEO Bruce Broussard and existing investors Lightspeed, Define Ventures, Qiming and SVB Capital. By the 2025 rebrand it reported a record growth year, its single highest transaction day on record, and a perfect service-level agreement history - the kind of stat that sounds boring until you remember it means the card has never quietly failed a member at the worst possible moment.

What "an outcomes company" actually means

The rebrand was not a logo wanting a refresh. The name evermore encodes a phrase the company repeats like a thesis: ever more value for each, ever better outcomes for all. Dropping "Soda Health" was a way of saying the job is no longer just administering benefits - it is being accountable for whether those benefits change anything. Aligning incentives across members, payers and retailers, and then measuring the result.

It is a tidy bit of positioning, and like all tidy positioning it will be judged by the data it produces rather than the sentence it came in. The useful part is that evermore built a system that can, in principle, produce that data. Food-is-medicine and social-determinants-of-health are easy phrases to say and hard things to prove. A platform that logs every item-level decision is at least pointed at the proof.

Back to the checkout line

Return to that scanner. The retiree's lettuce goes through, the cigarettes do not, and the receipt prints in a second. Multiply that across 70,000 locations and a benefit pool measured in the tens of billions, and you have either a very large administrative convenience or the early shape of how American supplemental benefits actually work. evermore is betting on the second.

The market that grew faster than its own plumbing now has plumbing. Whether that turns benefits from a marketing line into a measurable health outcome is the open question - and, conveniently, the exact thing evermore renamed itself to answer. The card already knows the difference between kale and candy. The harder test is whether the company can prove the difference shows up in someone's health a year later. That is the bet still being settled, one transaction at a time.