Angle Health is a health insurance startup that wants to serve plans to companies as small as two employees all the way to a Walmart-sized company.
The company, founded in 2019, received a $58 million funding round led by Portage in January.
Over the past 10 years, there has been an explosion in new ways to deliver care — telehealth, digital pharmacies and behavioral health programs — but these new innovations aren't always reaching those who could benefit from them, co-founder Ty Wang told Becker's.
"That, for me, is pretty personal because I grew up in a fairly low-income family. My parents were not educated. They worked service jobs their entire careers … they were working for the kind of companies that aren't paying for things like these digital health programs, things that are separately contracted outside of the health plan that your big tech companies are offering," Mr. Wang said. "A lot of these services are things that would benefit people like my parents the most."
Angle Health's aim is to build fully customizable benefits for employers and employees, Mr. Wang said.
"We realized that we really have to build this health plan or health insurance infrastructure from the ground up, in order to fundamentally change the way that people approach and access healthcare, to really democratize access to these new ways of receiving these healthcare services, away from the limited distribution that exists today within our current system and within the incumbents," Mr. Wang said.
Caleb Parker, Angle Health's chief operating officer, told Becker's the company can install a new plan group in 48 hours, compared to 15 to 20 business days at other insurers.
Angle Health first catered to start-ups looking to provide benefits to its employees but has evolved to serve employers of all sizes, Mr. Parker said.
"Our ability to deliver custom benefits is something that only exists in the 1,000 to 4,000-plus employee marketplace, and we're bringing it all the way down to two employees," he said.
Angle Health also allows brokers to self-serve, Mr. Parker said, cutting down the time it takes to provide companies with price quotes and information.
Other insurers tend to have "siloed" operations, Mr. Wang said, with claims, customer support, sales and other departments operating on different platforms.
"It makes it very difficult for them to answer very simple questions, and makes it very difficult to do these things like quoting and underwriting and enrollment," he said. "We essentially built this infrastructure from the ground up on a unified data infrastructure, and that's what really powers our operations."
The business has grown quickly so far, Mr. Wang said, and plans to continue expanding.
"One thing that's really important, especially having seen how some of these other start-up health plans and insurtechs have ended up, is that our growth is sustainable. We're not looking to grow just for the sake of growing those topline numbers, but to grow in a way that is sustainable for us, for our customers, so that we're not disappearing overnight," he said.