Nava Benefits Has Raised a $40M Series B. Here’s What It Means for Our Mission to #FixHealthcare.

We’re excited to announce that Nava has raised a $40M Series B from an incredible group of investors including Thrive Capital, GV, K5 Global, Homebrew, Quiet Capital, Avid Ventures, Sound Ventures and more. We wanted to use this milestone to share an update on the progress we’ve made so far and where we’re focused going forward.

Two years ago, we decided to go all in to help fix healthcare in America.

We started out by studying the healthcare system and listening to stakeholders. After a year of research, we reached a key insight. To fix healthcare, you have to fix its largest marketplace: employer-sponsored benefits.

Why? Nearly half of Americans get their healthcare through their employer. But the quality and variety of their health benefits are largely controlled by one major gatekeeper: the benefits broker. Most employers rely on a benefits broker to do everything from designing their insurance plans, to identifying new benefits to offer, and even educating their employees on how to use their benefits.

Despite this massively important role, the traditional brokerage industry hasn’t innovated in decades, and is stuck in an era of faxes, printouts, and excel spreadsheets, while being driven by misaligned incentives.

The result is that the best innovation in healthcare, digital health, and benefits is not making its way to most American families, leaving them with status quo solutions that deliver spiraling costs and middling outcomes.

So we re-imagined benefits brokerage.

We believe that to #fixhealthcare, we need to fix brokerage first. And so we set out to build a new kind of brokerage, one laser-focused on bringing cutting-edge innovation and tools down-market to small and midsize businesses, while building a better value proposition for the brokers and client success folks that serve them.

We’ve made a lot of progress in the 19 months since we launched. Nava now serves hundreds of employers and manages the health plans for 10’s of thousands of members, delivering all-around better employee experiences at a lower cost. Our approach is working and has resulted in 73% lower medical renewals for Nava clients as compared to the national average. Our CS team provides proactive, year-round support with a guaranteed response time of 24 hours or less, and our members give us a 94% satisfaction rate on our tools.

We’re so confident in our offering that we created the Nava Performance Guarantee — satisfaction or your money back. As far as we know, we’re the the first (and only) brokerage to offer anything like it.

And brokers joining Nava are thriving. From day one of their tenure, we give our Partners the leads, tools, and support to focus on what they do best, educating and winning new clients, enabling them to grow their book at 6X the industry average rate. And our unique approach to client success and employee experience keeps their clients happier (with a 99.3% retention rate).

In March, we launched the Nava Benefits Search Engine, the industry’s first community-driven benefits marketplace focused on giving HR teams unprecedented access and visibility into the entire benefits ecosystem.

We have high conviction that good things will happen in benefits when two other things happen: 1) HR teams get access to better benefits innovation and 2) employees get more support on their benefits journey. And now we’re ready to scale our impact on both fronts.

This funding will accelerate Nava’s mission and impact.

Benefits will undergo more change in the next 5 years than the last 25, driven by innovation, budgetary pressures, and a shifting buyer demographic. To help HR professionals navigate all that will change, we’re focusing on what we know will stay the same:

1. Employees will want to get more value out of their benefits. So we’re developing new tech tools to help employees feel great about their healthcare. Through every step of their plan lifecycle — from open enrollment, to seeking and receiving care, to managing their healthcare costs — they’ll be met with support instead of confusion.
2. Employers will want benefits support to be easier for the HR team. HR leaders need support year-round, not just during renewal season. Their to-do lists are growing by the day, and traditional brokerages just can’t keep up. We’ve invested in our team so they can act as the outsourced benefits department employers need to get things done. With 99.3% retention, this approach has proven that when you give industry experts better tools and support, they’re more successful in delivering better outcomes to the employers who need them.
3. Employers will want better benefits for less money. Great benefits are the key to better employee satisfaction, retention, and engagement — but they shouldn’t come with a big price tag. We’ve taken the cost savings playbooks of the Fortune 500 and scaled it to give employers a competitive edge at a competitive price.

It’s full speed ahead for #fixhealthcare.

Finally, we want to thank all of our customers, employees, advisors, and investors for the support so far. It’s truly been a team effort and we wouldn’t be here without your trust and feedback.

We’re just getting started — and the future is bright. 🚀

If you’re interested in learning more about Nava’s services, please email sales@navabenefits.com.

If you’re interested in working with us, visit navabenefits.com/careers