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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz
Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz is the CEO and co-founder of Chapter, an AI-powered Medicare navigation platform he started in 2020 after watching his own parents struggle to enroll. Built with co-founder Vivek Ramaswamy and early backing from J.D. Vance, Chapter crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue and raised a $100 million Series E in April 2026 at a roughly $3 billion valuation. A former Palantir government-team lead with degrees from Wharton and Cambridge, he calls himself one of the most hated people in the Medicare brokerage business precisely because Chapter's advisors are paid to recommend the best plan rather than the most lucrative one.
George Kalogeropoulos
George Kalogeropoulos is the co-founder and CEO of HealthSherpa, the private-sector enrollment engine that sits on top of HealthCare.gov. When the federal exchange buckled at its 2013 launch, he and two collaborators built a faster alternative in a matter of days. HealthSherpa has since enrolled more than 10 million Americans in ACA coverage. Raised in Greece by a sculptor father and a tutor mother, he studied political science at Yale, did a stint at Bridgewater Associates, then pivoted a Y Combinator rent-prediction startup into a mission to make health insurance legible.
Fred Turner
Fred Turner is the founder and CEO of Curative, a health-insurance company built on the radical premise of no copays, no deductibles, and no cost-sharing for in-network care. A British biochemist who dropped out of Oxford, he won the UK's Young Engineer of the Year at 17 for building a PCR machine to study his brother's red hair, founded cattle-genetics and diagnostics startups, then pivoted Curative into one of the largest COVID-19 testing providers in the United States before reinventing it as a health plan. He says his goal is to put his own company out of business by keeping members healthy.
Vivek Shah
Vivek Shah is the co-founder and CEO of SimplyInsured, a San Francisco company that lets small businesses compare and buy employee health insurance entirely online - billed as 'Kayak for health insurance.' An MIT-trained engineer and former McKinsey healthcare analyst, he started the company in 2012 after a maddening personal experience trying to buy coverage. Backed by Y Combinator (W13), Bessemer, and Polaris, SimplyInsured has served roughly 25,000 small businesses and saved them more than $50 million.
Will Young
Will Young is the co-founder and CEO of Sana, an Austin-based tech-enabled health plan that aims to cut small-business health insurance costs by up to 30%. A Stanford and Harvard Business School graduate who passed through Google and Justworks before starting a company in an industry he had no background in, Young bet that being an outsider was the advantage. Sana launched in 2018, went fully remote from day one against investor advice, and by its $60M Series B in 2022 had raised roughly $107M total while operating across eight states.
Laura Speyer
Laura Speyer is the co-CEO of Catch, a benefits marketplace that helps America's self-employed and independent workers find and enroll in health, dental, and vision insurance. After Catch's original founders shut the company down in March 2023, Speyer and her former CLEAR colleague Alexa Irish bought it with their own money and relaunched it in time for the November 2023 open enrollment. A Yale-trained dealmaker who came up through KKR and led corporate development and growth at CLEAR, Speyer pitches Catch as a 'personalized HR department' for the roughly 60 million Americans who work without an employer's safety net.
Anirban Gangopadhyay
Anirban Gangopadhyay is the co-founder and CTO of Angle Health, an AI-native health insurance platform serving small and mid-sized businesses across 44 U.S. states. A Columbia University computer scientist and former Palantir machine learning engineer, he previously served as a Stokes Scholar at the U.S. Department of Defense and co-founded Zircon Technologies - an AI-enabled clinical trial recruitment startup that was acquired - before building Angle Health through Y Combinator's W20 batch. Angle Health raised $134 million in a December 2025 Series B and has grown revenue 26x since its Series A, with a mission to redesign healthcare delivery through AI-first technology.
Sean Mehra
Sean Mehra is the co-founder and CEO of HealthTap, a Sunnyvale-based virtual-first primary and urgent care platform serving millions of Americans across all 50 states. A Yale biomedical engineering graduate and Stanford MBA, Mehra pivoted from aspiring physician to serial tech entrepreneur—building games companies with hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players before co-founding HealthTap during his first year at Stanford business school. Under his leadership as CEO (appointed June 2021), HealthTap has grown to serve over 350 million consumers, partnered with Samsung Health to embed virtual care in millions of Android devices, and launched Dr.A.I., an LLM-powered pre-visit interview system. Mehra also co-founded what is now Yale's TSAI City entrepreneurship incubator.
Tylon Wang
Tylon Wang (Ty Wang) is the Co-Founder and CEO of Angle Health, an AI-native health insurance platform that builds custom, full-service health plans for small and medium-sized businesses across 44 states. A former Palantir deployment strategist and Y Combinator alumnus, Wang founded Angle Health in 2019 after watching his immigrant parents navigate a healthcare system that wasn't built for people like them. Under his leadership, Angle Health has raised nearly $200 million in funding — including a $134 million Series B in December 2025 — and grown revenue 26x since its 2022 Series A, now serving more than 3,000 employers.