Most people don't use fax machines at home anymore, and why would you with the relative ease of email and other forms of digital messaging? But there's a least one industry that still clings heavily to paper: health care.
A Bay Area startup wants to help bring U.S.-based insurance companies into the 21st century by creating the digital infrastructure that will allow them to integrate customer data into more user-friendly apps.
Noyo was founded in 2017 by CEO Shannon Goggin and COO Dennis Lee, and on Thursday the San Francisco-based company announced a $45 million Series B that was led by Norwest Venture Partners and also included Workday Ventures, Gusto, Cap Table Coalition, and several existing investors. This brings its total funding to more than $61 million.
Goggin and Lee met while working on product and operations teams at the human resources company Zenefits, and they quickly realized that benefits providers didn't have the technical tools to share data with them at scale.
"The challenge for us was to really build amazing experiences for people to understand their benefits, we needed a lot of data, we needed a lot of information about what this plan covers or what you're enrolled in or when your card is coming in the mail," Goggin told me, and the providers would say, "you should send that thing to us by fax or you just need to call Betty on Mondays, and that didn't work for a scaling technology company."
The company develops application protocol interfaces, or APIs, that insurance companies can use to quickly and securely connect with other third-party apps, specifically for employer-provided group benefits, so that employees can more easily access and understand their benefits.
At the moment, Noyo focuses primarily on working on insurance benefits of all kinds from health to life. Eventually, the company wants to expand to all other types of benefits like fertility, retirement, tuition reimbursement and anything else that may emerge.
In addition to building APIs for insurance providers, Noyo also serves the third party apps that want to tap into its APIs, and it charges both types of customers annual subscription fees based on usage and volume.
The company has a little over 100 employees with about 40% of its workforce evenly split between its San Francisco and Durham offices, and the rest distributed around the country. Goggin wants to increase the company's headcount around 40% to 50% this year and is focused on hiring across engineering, product management, analytics and customer success teams.
While Noyo isn't disclosing how many customers it currently has, the company already partners with companies such as Ameritas, Beam, Guardian Life, Humana, Rippling, Unum and Zenefits.
Goggin told me that they're onboarding insurance providers and third-party apps at about the same rate, and she expects to cover about 90% of the insurance carrier market in the US by the end of the year.
