Buying insurance is often a tedious, complicated and expensive process. There are hundreds of companies to select plans from followed by countless pages to read once you think you’ve found the right plan.
KindHealth, founded in 2015, aims to simplify the process. The Austin-based company helps individuals who don’t get insurance from their employers find a plan for health, dental, vision, accident, life and cancer insurance. Users complete a questionnaire about themselves and what insurance options they need, then KindHealth suggests plans. The platform makes sure you are covered without paying for things you don’t need.
“A large part of the secrete sauce [of KindHealth], if you will, is the technology in the backend,” Andrew Tomasik, COO and co-founder, told Built In. “We utilize and we’re really pressing into AI. That’s going to be a big component of what we’re built on so we can make better and better recommendations that best fit the consumer, and really try to automate a lot of the process to take that off of the consumer’s plate.”
Tomasik said the company has plans to improve the AI technology currently used. In doing so, KindHealth will nearly double its employee headcount from 32 people to 52 or 54 later this year. This includes doubling the company’s engineering team and adding to its product, design, marketing, carrier relations and RevOps teams.
Last summer, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services added a new regulation that allows employers not offering group insurance plans to provide employees with a stipend to find their own insurance through health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs). Tomasik said this change provides additional opportunities for KindHealth.
“We now have the ability to work with the employer directly and go direct to the employee,” he said. “There’s a big opportunity for KindHealth, and we’re positioned to really partner up with a lot of those employers to work with their employees in sort of a traditional benefits administration role. As such, we need to be able to accelerate our growth and our capabilities of servicing those.”
KindHealth’s insurance platform is available in all 50 states. The company represents over 250 insurance companies.
