A local startup founded by business students has raised $5.4 million to create digital-first, easy-to-understand and more-affordable health benefits for small business.
UnifiHealth Corp. will grow its seven-member team from the round, led by Anthemis, with participation from Echelon, Flare Capital, Digitalis Ventures and Great Oaks VC.
"We’re making good on our promise of bridging the gap between coverage that businesses can actually afford with coverage that people actually need," co-founder and CEO Ross Klosterman said in a news release.
UnifiHealth will target self-insured employers with fewer than 200 employees. As a third-party administrator, it will not be the underwriter. (Basically self-funded plans are what they sound like: The business or a group of business creates a pool from which small claims are paid, then has catastrophic reinsurance.)
By unbundling the coverage, the company says, it can lower the cost of benefits by about 20% while preserving choice of doctors and health systems.
Its first plans take effect in January with employers in Cincinnati.
"UnifiHealth was built with the members at the center of our approach, including improving the member experience and making it easier for them to select the coverage that is right for them,” Olivia Cameron, co-founder and chief product officer, said in the release.
The company entered the Rev1 Ventures startup studio about a year ago. It was founded in 2019 by then-MBA students at Dartmouth and Northwestern universities, who graduated in 2020.
The new funding follows a $1.4 million seed round in December.
Klosterman worked as an accountant and in investment banking in Boston after graduating in 2012 from Ohio State University, according to his LinkedIn profile. Last year he earned both the MBA and a master's degree in public health at Dartmouth.
He got the idea for UnifiHealth while working in corporate development for Boston-based AthenaHealth, which makes enterprise software and mobile apps for healthcare, he told Columbus Business First in January. Many new companies emerged nationwide in the past few years to better manage health costs, including ones targeted to specialties such as primary care and behavioral health – but all were targeted to large self-funded employers.
Cameron is the Northwestern grad, and co-founder Brodie Stone, chief revenue officer, also got his MBA from Dartmouth. For now the company is working remotely and has a coworking space, but future growth will be focused in Columbus.
The three co-founders have written on the UnifiHealth website about how they were inspired by their parents who own small businesses.
New York City-based Anthemis, which focuses on fintech, also led a $50 million round in June for Columbus digital home and auto insurer Branch Financial Inc. and participated in a 2020 round for digital agency Matic Insurance Services Inc., which moved to Columbus from Los Angeles.
“The UnifiHealth team is founded by visionaries who share our focus of developing emerging technologies that will truly change the market and improve people’s lives,” Anthemis Partner Ruth Foxe Blader said in the release.
