Sana is excited to announce an additional $3.6M in seed funding led by Gigafund and Trust Ventures, bringing the total funding to date to $6.3M. Changing the healthcare industry is a big lift that requires patient capital and long-term vision. Gigafund and Trust have both, adding Sana to a portfolio of investments that includes startups in space exploration, nuclear energy, AI processor chips and 3D printed homes. Gigafund and Trust join Greenlight Re and mark vc as the other major institutional investors in Sana.

Sana offers premium health benefits for small businesses at 20% lower cost than traditional options. Through vertical integration, modern care management, and intelligent backend automation, we cut out much of the waste associated with traditional health insurance and pass that benefit on to our customers. Sana members can see the doctors they want without the worry of out-of-network fees.

Sana works to solve a simple problem: healthcare in the US is insanely overpriced. The US is an extreme outlier in healthcare spend per capita. The root causes of accelerating costs are not a mystery – wasteful spending costs the US healthcare system roughly one trillion dollars every year and the waste is easy to identify. Why isn’t the market fixing it? We see three main reasons for the market failure: lack of competition, broken distribution and massive cascading technical debt. 

Healthcare markets in the US are dominated by giant monopolies across carriers, hospitals and drug companies. Every year, these monopolies pass on arbitrary price hikes to consumers while ignoring myriad innovative care solutions that could deliver better care at lower cost. Those monopolies are enabled by traditional broker distributors who have a direct financial incentive to sell expensive plans. These excessive profits have made incumbent players complacent and they haven’t updated their technology in forty years. Now they have so much technical debt that they couldn’t innovate even if they wanted to.

Sana has started fresh with a modern, customer-focused approach. We sell our plans directly, cutting out the middleman broker so we can build the product around our customers’ needs. We offer free premium services to our customers through partnerships with Plushcare, Maven, Beam, ClassPass, and Calm. We have built all of our own technology from scratch on a modern HIPAA compliant web stack (AWS, Rails, React, etc) which enables us to be a leader in back office automation and data-driven approaches to care management. We are obsessed with making a smarter, more human health plan. 

The results have been incredible. We launched in Texas last year and now have dozens of customers and thousands of individuals on Sana Benefits health plans. Our early customers have had amazing results (see testimonials from Door and Abodewell). Clients tell us they save tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars each year because of our services and their employees see the doctors they want. Most importantly, our members feel like we have their back when they need it. We are building a more human kind of healthcare that gets us excited.

We are hiring in our Austin HQ and across the US (we are a very remote-friendly company). Come join us in our mission to make quality healthcare accessible, understandable and affordable or reach out to our team at hello@sanabenefits.com