The company will use the fresh funds to scale the business and sales, focus on product development through custom insurance products
Loop Health, a Pune-based health insurance startup, has raised $12 Mn in a Series A round co-led by Elevation Capital and General Catalyst. This round saw participation from other investors including Vinod Khosla (through Khosla Ventures), YC Continuity Fund, and Tribe Capital, and also featured leading angels including Amit Kumar Agarwal (Founder and CEO, NoBroker), Ramakant Sharma (Founder and COO, Livspace), Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal (Co-founders, Meesho), Eren Bali (Co-founder and CEO, Carbon Health; Co-founder, Udemy), Zach Sims (Co-founder and CEO, Codeacademy), and Kate Ryder (Founder and CEO, Maven Clinic).
Loop Health has witnessed significant growth, insuring 50,000+ members across 150 companies in the last 12 months and growing 50% month-over-month. Its corporate team has also grown from 10 to ~80 employees in this period and is currently operational in Pune, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. Amit Punchhi, former CBO and CIO at HDFC Life, recently joined as President in a valuable addition to the founding team and company. Loop targets covering 1 million members by the end of 2022 and 5 million members across Southeast Asia in the next five years. The company will use the fresh funds to scale the business and sales, focus on product development through custom insurance products (including wellness) and physical healthcare clinics, and drive strategic hiring, mainly in the sales and engineering verticals.
Established in 2018, by Mayank Kale, Ryan Singh, Amrit Singh, and Shami Raj, Loop Health’s offerings aim to revolutionize how health insurance policies work. Currently, the startup provides group health insurance plans from prominent insurers to companies, ranging from startups to big corporations, bundled with a virtual primary care experience through an in-house medical team and network of other service providers. Distinct from other insurance brokers, the startup ensures members get access to high-quality preventive health care as an add-on benefit—instead of them only using the policy/product later at the hospitalization, medical procedure or claims stage.
Before starting Loop Health, Mayank Kale built digital health records for half a million patients across India. During that time, he recognized a fundamental problem—primary care doctors get paid to treat patients when they are sick, not to keep them healthy. He wanted to start a business that would actively take care of people and was incentivized to keep them healthy. By bundling insurance and primary care, this is possible. Through Loop, the founders aim to disrupt the medical insurance industry by bridging the disconnect between health insurance and health care, and turning it into a more empathetic, accessible and preventive system.
Mayank Kale, Co-founder and CEO, Loop Health, said, “My experience of working with clinics in villages helped me see first hand how patients are at a disadvantage because they lack medical knowledge. The healthcare system has the incentive to over prescribe medication and suggest unnecessary procedures. This is something we want to fundamentally change.
At Loop we’ve put our doctors on the same side as the insurer. Our goal is to provide excellent primary care in order to prevent sickness and avoid hospital visits. This results in lesser claims for insurers, and more affordable insurance. There’s a massive opportunity to bring this new category of Health Assurance to India, and we’re the only ones in the country doing this.”
Group health insurance (benefits) is a largely underpenetrated segment in the country—it is mainly bought by company Human Resources from traditional offline brokers. Existing brokers tend to neglect the mid-market and small business segments (often served by small brokers or not served at all) as they typically concentrate on large enterprise customers. And, their offerings are limited to plain vanilla health insurance with no health benefits.
Today, in addition to offering traditional hospitalization insurance, Loop enables their client companies to help their employees (and their families) avail proper healthcare services without the hassle of visiting clinics, waiting in line, and paying for each appointment. Through the mobile app, members can get access to preventive care, a dedicated medical advisor, and a team of doctors any time. Additional health and wellness benefits include yoga and meditation sessions, mental health consults, easy access to and discounts on lab tests and medicines, along with personalized care planning, e.g., for one of their client companies, they curated a “home quarantine kit” to cater to the medical needs of a person who was isolated at home.
Commenting on the funding, Mayank Khanduja, Partner, Elevation Capital, said, “Health insurance is at a very nascent stage in India with only 10% of the total population covered, excluding public sector schemes, leading to high out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure. Moreover, employer provided health insurance has been growing at 20-25% and it is likely to accelerate further post COVID. We are extremely excited about the integrated insurance and healthcare offering that Loop is bringing to its customers, and that has led to extremely high customer NPS.
As the market matures, Loop has the right offering in the market to cater to discerning customers and we are delighted to partner with them on this mission.”
Hemant Taneja, Managing Partner, General Catalyst said, “General Catalyst’s healthcare investment strategy is focused on Health Assurance, moving from a system of ‘sick care’ into a Health Assurance system designed to help people stay well, bend the cost curve, and make quality care more affordable and more accessible to all. Loop falls squarely in the Health Assurance space. This team is building something incredibly differentiated in the Indian market where insurance is nascent and the opportunity to drive better health outcomes is massive.”
Vinod Khosla, Founder, Khosla Ventures, added, “Care delivery in India has many pain points with conflicting incentives. Loop is changing the cost equation by allowing payers and providers to work together. Through its unique product and affordable pricing, Loop Health has a significant competitive advantage.”
In a huge testimony to the platform, around 40% employees of Loop’s customers consult a Loop doctor in the first three months on the plan, compared to about 8% of employees who only use their company provided health insurance plans. Loop’s expertise in healthcare and insurance also drives industry-leading claims acceptance for its members, leading to strong employer and employee NPS. Currently, it has over 150 companies as clients (with approximately 50,000 total members insured), including Shaadi.com, rediff.com, Helpshift, Knorr Bremse, Shoptimize, Weikfield, and Moonshine Meadery.
Source: Business World
