Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator -backed Nayya is
on a mission to simplify choosing and managing employee benefits through
machine learning and data transparency.
The company has raised $2.7 million in seed funding led
by Social Leverage, with
participation from Guardian Strategic Ventures, Cameron Ventures, Soma Capital,
as well as other strategic angels.
The process of choosing an employer-provided healthcare
plan and understanding that plan can be tedious at best and incredibly
confusing at worst. And that doesn’t even include all of the supplemental plans
and benefits associated with these programs.
Co-founded by Sina Chehrazi and Akash Magoon, Nayya tries to solve this
problem. When enrollment starts, employers send out an email that includes a
link to Nayya’s Companion, the company’s flagship product.
Companion helps employees find the plan that is right for
them. The software first asks a series of questions about lifestyle, location,
etc. For example, Nayya co-founder and CEO Chehrazi explained that people who
bike to work, as opposed to driving in a car, walking or taking public
transportation, are 20 times more likely to get into an accident and need
emergency services.
Companion asks questions in this vein, as well as
questions around whether you take medication regularly or if you expect your
healthcare costs to go up or down over the next year, without getting into the
specifics of chronic ailments or diseases or particular issues.
Taking that data into account, Nayya then looks at the
various plans provided by the employer to show you which one matches the user’s
particular lifestyle and budget best.
Nayya doesn’t just pull information directly from the
insurance company directory listings, as nearly 40% of those listings have at
least one error or are out of date. It pulls from a broad variety of data
sources, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), to get
the cleanest, most precise data around which doctors are in network and the
usual costs associated with visiting those doctors.
Alongside Companion, Nayya also provides a product called
“Edison,” which it has dubbed the Alexa for Helathcare. Users can ask Edison
questions like “What is my deductible?” or “Is Dr. So-and-So in my network and
what would it cost to go see her?”
The company helps individual users find the right
provider for them with the ability to compare costs, location and other factors
involved. Nayya even puts a badge on listings for providers where another
employee at the company has gone and had a great experience, giving another
layer of validation to that choice.
As the healthtech industry looks to provide easier-to-use
healthcare and insurance, the idea of “personalization” has been left behind in
many respects. Nayya focuses first and foremost on the end-user and aims to
ensure that their own personal healthcare journey is as simple and
straightforward as possible, believing that the other pieces of the puzzle will
fall into place when the customer is taken care of.
Nayya plans on using the funding to expand the team
across engineering, data science, product management and marketing, as well as
doubling down on the amount of data the company is purchasing, ingesting and
cleaning.
Alongside charging employers on a per seat, per month
basis, Nayya is also looking to start going straight to insurance companies
with its product.
“The greatest challenge is educating an entire ecosystem
and convincing that ecosystem to believe that where the consumer wins, everyone
wins,” said Chehrazi. “How to finance and understand your healthcare has never
been more important than it is right now, and there is a huge need to provide
that education in a data driven way to people. That’s where I want to spend the
next I don’t know how many years of my life to drive that change.”
Nayya has five full-time employees currently and 80% of
the team comes from racially diverse backgrounds.
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