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Nayya, the recommendation and personalization engine for healthcare

Digital health became a reality during the Covid-19 pandemic, providing a socially distanced way for people to use apps, smartphones, wearable devices, and web services to connect with doctors and manage many other tasks that would previously require a physical presence. That opened the door for a host of other online tools to enter the conversation with the promise of giving users not just an alternative, but potentially better service than they might have experienced without it. A startup called nayya — which has created a recommendation engine to help people choose benefits, as well as an RPA-style digital assistant to help users navigate insurance administration, clinics and workplaces, especially when needed make claims — has closed a round of 55 million dollars.

The round of actions Serie C is being led by ICONIQ Growth (the VC making later-stage investments on behalf of various family offices for high-profile tech leaders like Chan Zuckerberg), with Transformation Capital, Felicis Ventures, and SemperVirens. Iconic, Felicis and SemperVirens are previous investors, while Transformation is a new investor with this round.

Sina Chehrazi, co-founder and CEO of nayya, gave a relatively wide range for the current valuation, between $500 million and $750 million. The company has confirmed that it has doubled its valuation since the last round.

Those numbers, since they are just paper valuations, are more useful as a marker of the growth of nayya. Chehrazi explains that he and co-founder Akash Magoon (who is the CTO) created nayya to fill what they saw as an information gap in the healthcare industry, particularly in the privatized US system.

Last year, he said, some 600,000 people filed for bankruptcy protection due to health care problems, meaning they were crippled by costys and how to manage them. “And many of these, 63%, had insurance,” she noted. Part of the problem is a lack of information on how to get the most out of a policy, combined with the fact that health care costs are skyrocketing.

"We live in a world where if you go to a hospital on the right or left side of a street, you could be paying a different amount of money for the same procedure," he said.

While acknowledging that much of this is also institutional and must fall to legislators, as they deal with these issues, the nayya, he said, is "solving today's pain by helping people choose the right plans and use them."

Lawmakers still have a long way to go to make health care affordable and usable by more people in the US, but they have already taken steps to make it a legal requirement for doctors to be more transparent about costs and health care data. patients, and that has provided an entry point for companies like nayya (and other health tech companies) take advantage of that for their algorithms.

Individual consumers use the algorithmic recommendation engine found with RPA from nayya. But the clients of nayya they are companies, contracting to provide their engine (and app) to their employees, both to help them determine what benefits they should get, based on their medical history and other factors, such as are they existing doctors and what networks they are on. If claims are subsequently made, help people figure out how to manage them to make the most of their rights.

Chehrazi said that nayya it has also been contracting with insurance companies, which larger companies are leaning on to provide more transparency to employees as part of their service package.

More importantly, he said nayya it has no intention of becoming an insurance provider, describing the company's role as more akin to being like a "Turbo Tax" to administer benefits, to help and make money from that service alone. It contacts as B2B and charges a flat monthly fee per user, regardless of how often the service is used, so there is no incentive built into the model to encourage more or less use.

At the basic level of growth per user, the company has seen its revenue grow 7 times since last year and will grow another 3 times this year, Chehrazi said. He does not reveal the number of clients, but said he works with both large companies and companies with as few as 50 employees. Over time, it will also launch a product aimed at freelancers and independent businesses that might want to use its recommendation system, though it's unclear whether it will be sold through the companies where those people hire or directly to those people.

Over time, nayya has expanded beyond health care to provide referrals and administrative assistance for other benefits organizations provide to employees, including life insurance, financial planning (eg, around pensions or for those who use their wages to regularly pay off student loans), and ancillary services like mental health and wellness.

“We believe that the exceptional growth and adoption of nayya in just over two years is a true testament to the strength of the platform based on sophisticated data and the growing need in the market. It is increasingly critical that employees are equipped with effective, data-driven tools to make more informed benefits decisions both at enrollment and throughout the year,” Caroline Xie, general partner of ICONIQ Growth, said in a statement. “We are delighted to continue supporting the team at nayya as they expand their mission.”

“Investing in the future of benefits is extremely important, especially as the healthcare landscape and consumer expectations are changing so rapidly,” added Mike Dixon, managing partner at Transformation Capital. “nayya has successfully integrated artificial intelligence throughout the benefits experience, creating a consumer-driven platform that eliminates benefits-related confusion and stress, while solving a massive challenge facing nearly every company and its employees".

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