Nova Benefits — Analysis

Summary

• Nova Benefits is an employee wellness platform that helps companies to enhance employee well-being through affordable health insurance, mental health counselling, and various other wellness programs.
• The startup was founded in October 2020 and is currently witnessing over 10x growth each year.
• The startup hits an average claims CSAT of 9.6/10.
• Initially, the startup raised $1 million in seed funding and within six months they raised another $10 million in a Series-A round (last funding round) from prominent investors like Titan Capital, Better Capital, Multiply Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Susquehanna International Group (SIG).
• Aims to serve over 10 million members on its platform in the next few years.
• The primary metrics of this startup include the number of insurance products sold to the employees of a company.
• Planning to monetize by up-selling health packages and value-added services in the future.

Team

• Saransh Garg (CEO) and Yash Gupta (CTO) are the co-founders of Nova Benefits.
• Saransh previously was an investor at Accel and founded a startup called Prodigal backed by Y Combinator. Yash previously worked at Samsung and he is the mind behind the tech of this company.
• Both the founders Saransh Garg and Yash Gupta are smart and diligent. They have good experience with startups and it’s whole ecosystem.
• The current team size consists of almost 100 members and the team is growing aggressively.
• The employee ratings are very good on Glassdoor i.e. 4.9/5 with a CEO approval rate of almost 100%. So, the overall team looks quite good.
• Currently, the startup plans to expand its engineering, product, and sales team to increase its wellness offering on the platform.

Product

• At Nova Benefits, all the employees are provided with a single platform to access their company-provided benefits.
• In India, most of the employees had a cumbersome experience while dealing with their health insurance as in most cases it covers only hospitalization. And most of them don’t even know that their company offered one.
• It consults with the company to decide the best health plans by maximizing the benefits and minimizing the cost.
• It also provides priority claims resolution for its clients for faster claim settlement.

For claim resolution they are solving these three main challenges:

1. Hidden policy clauses: There are many hidden clauses like pre-existing diseases not being covered, low room-rent limits, etc. Nova detects all such hidden clauses and gets rid of them at the time of policy purchase.
2. Missing documents when filing a claim from an employee: Nova does a document deficiency check for the employee ensuring all necessary papers are in place when submitting a claim.
3. Erroneous claim rejection: Sometimes insurers unknowingly make a claim rejection. The claims team at Nova disproves these erroneous rejections and brings them to the attention of the insurer, which then gets promptly approved.

Market & Opportunity

• The corporate health and wellness market in India is valued at near about $7 billion currently and is expected to reach a value of almost $18 billion by 2025 according to a report by RedSeer.
• The Covid-19 pandemic has increased the penetration rate. Most of Indians will be covered by their employers.
• Current estimates suggest India may go from 10% private health insurance penetration to 90% after 2030.
• In 2020, the global corporate wellness market size was valued at $ 52.8 billion and it is expected to expand at a CAGR of 7.0% from 2021 to 2028.
• The size of the market here is massive because every single company is their potential client.
• Due to the covid-19 pandemic employer’s focus has shifted to more preventive management by helping employees adapt to new standards.

Traction

• The startup is currently growing at a rapid rate and became the fastest-growing insurance tech platform.
• In the first seven months of its inception, the startup has onboarded 70+ clients with 25,000 members on its platform.
• To date, the startup has onboarded over 150 clients including companies like Dream 11, CoinDCX, Snapdeal, Zenoti, and Yulu Bikes, with 100,000+ users on the platform

Competition

Direct Competitors:

Plum

• Plum is an India-based insurance tech platform that provides health insurance, benefits, and related services for employees.
• Their product offers detailed information about the policy and provides a guided claim experience.
• Founded by Abhishek Poddar in 2019 and raised $20.6 million in funding till date.

Onsurity

• Onsurity is an India-based employee healthcare platform that provides solutions such as subscription-based health benefits and insurance for businesses.
• They also provide customized health plans and a simplified claim experience.
• Founded by Yogesh Agarwal in 2020 and raised $16 million in funding till date.

Loop Health

• Loop Health is an India-based insurance broker platform that offers group health Insurance policy and premium primary care membership for individuals and employers.
• They also provide affordable health benefits and HR tools to manage employee benefits.
• Founded by Mayank Kale in 2018 and raised $14.3 million in funding till date.
• Loop Health is a part of the Y Combinator W20 batch.

Other competitors in this category include SecureNow, Digit, HDFC Ergo and Riskcovry.

In-direct Competitors:

Truworth Wellness

• Truworth Wellness is a corporate wellness company where it enables its users to access a variety of resources required to improve their health & well-being in a gamified, personalized, and data-driven manner.
• The company was founded in the year 2008 and generated annual revenue of $1.8M as of December 2019. In the year 2018, they generated annual revenue of $1.22M according to Tracxn.

Curai Health

• Curai Health is an AI-based teleconsultation solution for individuals and employees. They are focused on both individuals as well as different businesses.
• The company was founded in the year 2017 and currently serving in 20 states in the USA

Wellable

• Wellable delivers customized employee wellness programs for employers to improve employee productivity, satisfaction, and retention.
• They are focused on employers and properties to activate their assets, increase leasing momentum and resellers to expand their offerings on employee wellness programs.
• The company was founded in the year 2013 and currently serves in the United States.

How Nova Benefits is different?

• Nova Benefits is completely different from all these companies as they are more focused on corporate health insurance and different wellness programs related to it.
• They provide great claims experience for their clients and overcome the challenges that lead to claim rejection with their platform.
• Even if a company already bought health insurance for its team, they have a tool that can administer and manage the health insurance policy.