What You Should Know:
- Venteur, the digital health startup helping companies provide personalized health insurance options to their employees, has closed a seed funding round at $7.6 million. T
- The funding is led by GSR Ventures, with participation by Headwater VC, Revelry Venture Partners, Houghton Street Ventures, Plug and Play, Techstars, CRCM Ventures, and various strategic angels. The funding round closed in June.
Improving Employee Healthcare Decision-Making
Venteur enables businesses to empower their employees with control over their own health care by offering an Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement (ICHRA). Using Venteur’s platform, employers provide pre-tax dollars to buy health insurance. Employees receive a digital wallet and are invited to Venteur’s marketplace to shop for health insurance coverage. The marketplace is powered by proprietary AI decision support tools, which leverage 30 years of medical claims data to make personalized suggestions on the best health plans for each employee.
“The ability to choose and keep our health insurance plan saved my dad’s life,” said Stacy Edgar, CEO and co-founder of Venteur. “Our goal is to bring this same health care decision-making control to all Americans. As we scale, the power of Venteur’s model is that it fundamentally re-aligns financial incentives, so that the whole health care system is aligned to serve consumers instead of intermediaries.”
Led by sibling co-founders Stacy and Tim Edgar, Venteur is building the health insurance system of the future. The sibling team was motivated to start the company after growing up amid their parents’ 30-year struggle with health insurance costs.
Venteur’s concierge-style ICHRA experience has been especially popular among larger employers in addition to small businesses. Early customers emphasize how the staggering cost-savings from the ICHRA model have enabled them to avoid layoffs and save jobs. Venteur estimates that the ICHRA model can save more than 5,000 employers – representing a total workforce of 20 million employees — at least $250 per employee per month while at the same time allowing them to provide more robust health insurance coverage to their workforce.
