health-insurance
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Kristen Prestano Is Teaching Health Insurance to Talk Like a Person
How a communications lifer became the marketing chief at one of health insurance's most watched companies, and why she keeps betting that clear beats clever.
The Drugstore That Swallowed the Health-Care Map
CVS Health has assembled a pharmacy, an insurer, a benefits manager and a care network under one red heart. The result is a $402 billion experiment in whether scale can make American health care feel less fragmented.
GHI
GHI pioneered the broad doctor network before the term PPO became everyday insurance language. Nearly nine decades later, its name survives inside EmblemHealth - and inside the health benefits of generations of New Yorkers.
Humana
How a 1961 nursing-home bet in Louisville became a Medicare Advantage powerhouse - and why Humana is now buying the clinic, the pharmacy and the house call instead of just the insurance card.
The Cigna Group
The insurance card is only the front door. Behind it sits a $274.9 billion machine spanning pharmacy benefits, specialty medicine, behavioral care and digital health - built to make a fragmented system behave more like one business.
UnitedHealth Group
UnitedHealth Group has built a vast loop around American health care - paying claims, delivering care, managing prescriptions and supplying the data beneath it all. The same integration that gives it unusual reach also puts every friction point under a brighter light.
Oscar Health
Oscar Health began with a friendly app and an unfriendly problem: American health insurance. Fourteen years later, its bigger bet is that the individual market can become the operating system for how people buy care.
Curacel
Curacel is an AI-powered insurance infrastructure company building the rails for insurance in emerging markets. Its cloud APIs let insurers automate claims processing and catch fraud, waste and abuse, while its Grow product lets banks, fintechs and e-commerce platforms embed insurance into their own apps. A Y Combinator Winter 2022 company founded in Nigeria, Curacel works with insurers such as AXA Mansard, Old Mutual and Jubilee across roughly ten African markets.
Insurf
Insurf is an AI-native decision and data layer for U.S. health insurance. Its first product, Inveto, turns denied healthcare claims into source-cited, physician-attested appeals so medical practices recover revenue they would otherwise write off. Each resolved claim feeds a proprietary coverage-decision graph of real payer behavior, which powers a second product, Surely, that prices the true cost of a health plan for employers and brokers. Founded in 2026 by Chang Lu and Bryan Chung, the company is part of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch and is based in San Francisco.
Halodoc
Halodoc is a Jakarta-based digital health platform that lets Indonesians consult licensed doctors, order medicine for home delivery, book lab tests and appointments, and buy insurance from a single mobile app. Founded in 2016 by Jonathan Sudharta and Doddy Lukito, it connects more than 20 million monthly active users with over 20,000 doctors, 4,000+ pharmacies and 1,400+ hospitals, and has raised roughly US$258 million led by Indonesian conglomerate Astra, Temasek and Novo Holdings.
Peak3
Peak3 (formerly ZA Tech) is a Singapore-headquartered insurtech that builds cloud-native, AI-ready core software for the insurance industry. Its modular platform - spanning policy administration, distribution, claims and orchestration - lets insurers, MGAs and brokers launch and run life, health and property & casualty products across many markets. Founded in 2018 out of Chinese insurtech ZhongAn and rebranded to Peak3 in 2024 alongside a US$35M Series A led by EQT, the company powers global insurers such as AIA, Generali, Prudential and Zurich, and embedded-insurance programs for digital platforms including Grab, Klook, Lazada and PayPay. Its software has supported over a billion policies across 20-plus countries.
TachyHealth
TachyHealth is a UAE-based healthcare AI company that helps hospitals, clinics and insurers close the gap between clinical care and payment. Founded in 2018, it builds AI-driven tools for medical coding, claims review and auditing, and clinical decision support - branded AiCode, AiReview and AiGuide - aimed at reducing administrative burden, controllable revenue loss and claim denials while advancing value-based care across the Middle East and Africa. In October 2025 it raised a $5M Series A led by Saudi insurer Tawuniya.
Cédric Kovacs-Johnson
Cédric Kovacs-Johnson is the founder and CEO of Flume Health, a New York-based software company that connects the fragmented healthcare data ecosystem so payers and employers can build and run health plans more efficiently. A chemical engineer by training, he first made his name as co-inventor of Spectrom, a full-color 3D printing technology that won the 2014 Collegiate Inventors Competition and was acquired by MakerBot. He founded Flume Health in 2017 and has raised more than $40 million in venture funding, including a $30 million Series A in 2022.
CoverGo | Insurtech
CoverGo is a global enterprise insurtech that gives insurers, MGAs, and brokers a no-code, API-first platform to build, distribute, administer, and process insurance products across life, health, and P&C lines. Founded in Hong Kong in 2017 by Tomas Holub, it runs on 500+ open insurance APIs and a patented drag-and-drop product builder, letting carriers launch new products in hours rather than months and modernize legacy core systems without ripping them out. Customers include AXA, Bupa, MSIG, Dai-ichi Life, and Bank of China Group Insurance, served from offices across Silicon Valley, New York, Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
Flume Health
Flume Health is a New York-based healthcare technology company building operational infrastructure that connects the fragmented data ecosystem behind health plans. Founded in 2017 by Cedric Kovacs-Johnson and Vineeth Bhuvanagiri, Flume gives payers, third-party administrators, and vendors a way to move, translate, and make sense of healthcare data. It started as a plan administrator, pivoted to the Relay integration platform, and has since evolved into an AI-native data platform - mapping enterprise data estates into a living knowledge graph and running domain-specific AI agents so non-technical teams can query and act on healthcare data in plain language.
Headway
Headway is a New York-based healthtech company building a software-enabled network that makes it easier to find a therapist and to pay for one with insurance. Its three-sided marketplace connects patients, mental health clinicians, and insurance plans: patients search for in-network providers with transparent copays, clinicians offload credentialing, billing, scheduling, and claims to Headway, and insurers gain a larger accessible network. Founded in 2019 by Andrew Adams and co-founders, Headway operates in all 50 states with roughly 34,000 clinicians and, after a $100M Series D in 2024, is valued at about $2.3 billion.
Workers Benefit Fund
Workers Benefit Fund is a New York-based, mission-driven company that closes the benefits gap for gig workers, freelancers and independent contractors. Acting as a PEO-style solution for the gig industry, it builds the technology, outreach infrastructure and partnerships that platforms, labor unions and public institutions need to connect non-traditional workers with health, wellness and financial benefits. Its flagship work powers the Drivers Benefits program alongside The Black Car Fund, which has enrolled tens of thousands of New York for-hire drivers at no cost to them.
Yuzu Health
Yuzu Health is a New York-based healthtech company that rebuilds the administrative backbone of health insurance into a single, white-labeled system of record. Operating as a vertically integrated third-party administrator (TPA), Yuzu runs the behind-the-scenes engine for claims processing, payments, and member administration, letting insurers, brokers, and self-funded employers launch highly configurable plan designs - direct provider contracts, cash-pay options, and dynamic copays - without the heavy services burden of legacy administrators. Founded in 2022, the company works with customers across all 50 states and has processed more than $1 billion in claims payment volume.
Max Kauderer
Max Kauderer is the co-founder and CEO of Yuzu Health, a New York-based third-party administrator building an operating system for health insurance. After stints at LinkedIn, Capital One, and Bain & Company, he started Yuzu in 2022 with Russell Pekala and Ryan Lee to let small businesses spin up flexible, transparent health plans in days rather than months. Yuzu raised a $35M Series A in April 2026 led by General Catalyst and Chemistry, bringing total funding to about $40M.
Arlo
Arlo is a New York-based health insurance startup rebuilding coverage for small and mid-sized businesses. It pairs AI-driven underwriting with value-based care and cost transparency to offer level-funded plans that make big-company benefits available to teams of roughly 10 to 150 employees, without the big-company admin. Founded in 2022 by former Palantir team lead Jan-Felix Schneider and ex-Finch engineering lead Karthik Bhaskara, Arlo raised a $4M seed round in 2025 led by Upfront Ventures and works with reinsurer Nationwide.
Rovi Health
Rovi Health is a New York-based digital health startup (Y Combinator F25) that gives employer health plans an AI-powered, text-first care concierge. Members text a nurse-guided clinician who treats common conditions virtually, then steer them to high-quality, in-network providers using terabytes of price and quality data - catching expensive care before it is scheduled. Founded in 2025 by brothers Santosh and Tarun Vallabhaneni, Rovi claims employers can cut 10-20% of annual healthcare spend while employees get concierge-level care.
Jan-Felix Schneider
Jan-Felix Schneider is the co-founder and CEO of Arlo, a New York health insurance company rebuilding coverage for small and mid-sized businesses from the ground up. A former Palantir deployment strategist and McKinsey consultant who grew up in Germany, he pairs a Columbia data science background with a plain conviction that people should not go broke while insured. Under his lead, Arlo underwrites its own level-funded plans, supports members directly, and builds its own technology - scaling to tens of thousands of covered lives and hundreds of employer groups, reaching profitability, and raising a $4M seed in 2025.
Santosh Vallabhaneni
Santosh Vallabhaneni is the co-founder and CEO of Rovi Health, a Y Combinator Fall 2025 startup building text-first, AI-enabled healthcare for employees. Patients get care over text or video while AI agents steer them to high-value, in-network providers and handle scheduling, cutting employer health spend by 10-20%. Before Rovi he was GM of Cedar's patient affordability products and an early go-to-market leader at AngelList, and he is a licensed health insurance broker. He founded the company with his brother Tarun, the CTO.
Accorded
Accorded is a San Francisco-based healthcare actuarial intelligence company that pairs actuarial expertise with software to simplify and scale value-based contracting. Its platform helps payers, providers, and digital-health companies forecast, contract around, and validate the financial value of care across the value-based contracting lifecycle. Founded in 2019 (originally as Cerebrae) by health actuary Frank Cheung and engineer Thomas Bedington, the company's flagship product, Acumen, turns raw claims, eligibility, and engagement data into standardized, actuarially rigorous, ready-to-use data assets so analytics teams can spend less time wrangling data and more time on strategy.
Chapter
Chapter is an AI-native Medicare advisory platform that helps older Americans choose the right Medicare and retirement healthcare coverage. Instead of acting as a commission-driven marketplace, Chapter reviews plans from every insurance carrier nationwide and pairs that data with licensed, independent advisors to deliver unbiased recommendations. Founded in New York in 2020, the company has supported more than 500,000 enrollees and crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
Curative
Curative is an Austin-based health insurance company that pivoted from being one of the largest U.S. COVID-19 testing providers into an employer-sponsored health plan with a simple promise: $0 copays, $0 deductibles, and $0 out-of-pocket costs for in-network care, provided members complete an annual preventive Baseline Visit. Founded in 2020 by Fred Turner, Isaac Turner, and Vlad Slepnev, the company packages insurance, pharmacy, telehealth, and care navigation into a single monthly premium aimed at removing the financial friction that keeps people from using their coverage.
Garner Health
Garner Health is a New York-based healthcare technology company that analyzes billions of medical claims to identify the highest-performing doctors, then pairs that data with employer-funded financial incentives so employees can see top providers at a fraction of the out-of-pocket cost. Founded in 2019 by Nick Reber, the company combines a member-facing care navigation app and concierge with a provider analytics engine (Garner DataPro / Garner Research Agent) used by employers and health plans to cut healthcare spend while improving outcomes.
HealthSherpa
HealthSherpa is the largest private enrollment platform for Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance in the United States. Born in 2013 as a faster, cleaner alternative to a glitchy HealthCare.gov, it now helps millions of Americans shop, compare, and enroll in subsidized marketplace plans in about seven minutes, while giving tens of thousands of agents and brokers free tools to manage their books of business. The company runs a federally approved Enhanced Direct Enrollment (EDE) platform used by consumers, insurance carriers, and agencies alike.
Alison Richards
Alison Richards is the CEO of Surest, a UnitedHealthcare company (formerly Bind) that builds a health plan with no deductibles and upfront prices people can see before they book care. A UnitedHealthcare veteran since 2012, she has turned the company's most contrarian benefits idea - let members shop for care the way they shop for everything else - into its fastest-growing employer plan.
Chris Ellis
Chris Ellis is the co-founder and CEO of Thatch, a San Francisco healthtech-meets-fintech company that lets employers hand workers tax-free dollars to buy and manage their own health benefits through ICHRA. A former cancer researcher who started at MIT and studied at Duke, Ellis lost his father to cancer at age six, an experience that shaped both his skepticism of the healthcare system and his drive to rebuild how it is paid for. Founded in 2021 with Adam Stevenson, Thatch now serves more than 1,000 companies and raised a $40M Series B led by Index Ventures in April 2025, on top of an earlier $38M Series A, with backing from a16z, General Catalyst, and Google Ventures.