Healia Raises $14M to Cut Health Costs for Working Couples
Healia (healiahealth.com) has raised a $14 million Series A led by 111° West Capital, bringing its total funding to $18 million, to expand a benefit built for households where both spouses are offered health insurance at work. Y Combinator, First Round, Pioneer Fund, GoAhead Ventures and North Coast Ventures also participated. First Round and Pioneer Fund backed the company at seed.
The problem Healia targets is narrow and expensive. More than three million US households carry two employer health plans at once and pay more than they need to as a result, because nothing in the benefits system helps a family figure out how the two plans should fit together. Employers cover the same family twice and absorb claims they did not need to take on.
Healia's product, the Total Care Option, is a health reimbursement arrangement. An employee enrolls the family on a spouse's plan as their base coverage, and their own employer reimburses premiums, deductibles, copays and other out-of-pocket costs instead of paying for a duplicate policy. The company handles setup, employee education and claims reimbursement, and its decision support software lets an employee upload a spouse's plan documents to compare household costs across the possible combinations.
Founder Priyang Shah was the 15th employee and first product manager at Root Insurance, which he helped scale to roughly 1,500 employees and a $6.5 billion IPO, and earlier was the 20th employee at Olive AI. Healia went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch.
The company's Y Combinator profile lists more than 50 customers across the country, with over 40,000 employees able to use the product. Healia says it now works with hundreds of employers and brokers nationwide.
Employer health costs have kept climbing, and most of the tooling sold to benefits teams tries to make a single plan cheaper to administer. Healia is working the other side of the problem, treating a second plan already sitting in the household as the asset that makes coverage cheaper for both the family and the employer paying for it.