A Columbus health benefits startup founded by a veteran of Root Insurance Co. and Olive AI has completed the Y Combinator startup accelerator – which nurtured companies including Reddit, Dropbox and Airbnb.
Healia Inc., founded in 2021, also reported raising $3.5 million in a March regulatory filing. The standard Y Combinator investment is $500,000.
Founder and CEO Priyang Shah was not immediately available for comment.
The startup has not announced a funding round, but Silicon Valley VC firm GoAhead Ventures lists Healia as part of its portfolio, and Healia's PitchBook profile says GoAhead led a round in March with undisclosed other investors.
Healia was among 260 startups in the winter 2024 Y Combinator batch, a three-month program in San Francisco that ended with "Demo Day" investor pitches last week, Bay Area Inno reported.
AI was a major theme for the Y Combinator cohort, and a large-language model is incorporated in Healia's tech, which helps compare health plans to find the best option, especially for dual-income households.
Employers use Healia to save money for both business and employee: If the employee joins their spouse's health plan, the employer covers the out-of-pocket expenses like co-payments. Employers on average save $10,000 while offering the perk, improving recruitment and retention.
The startup already has signed 14 employers as customers, generating revenue that would annualize to more than $200,000, according to Healia's profile on Y Combinator's website.
Shah was an early employee for nearly two years of the now-shuttered Olive, when it was still named CrossChx Inc., according to his LinkedIn profile. He was a product manager and then product director overseeing development of products including the Connect App. Several months after he left CrossChx sold its entire product line to a Texas company as it pivoted to the Olive strategy for hospital administrative automation.
In early 2017 Shah became the first product manager and among the first employees at digital insurer Root Inc., which like Olive had Drive Capital as its first investor. After nearly five years, he started Healia.
Healia then connected back to Olive, becoming one of the companies in the Olive Ventures initiative that started after its $400 million VC round in 2021. The idea was to nurture startups that would solve specific healthcare problems using Olive's technology.
Olive was sold for parts and shut down last fall, leaving nothing to investors. The Olive Ventures portfolio, including its equity stakes in Healia and four other startups, were sold for $1 million cash in the liquidation to Olive founder and CEO Sean Lane.
