When we started Yuzu in 2022, we set out to build a better health plan. We failed, and were humbled by how hard it is to design tradeoffs and balance incentives in such a complicated healthcare system.
Along the way, we were lucky enough to get exposure to successful new health plans that liked the speed we could build software and our guiding values of honesty and responsiveness. We realized that the biggest bottleneck to the growth of these new health plans is the fragmented systems and vendor partnerships stitched together to bring their ideas to life.
We saw that these innovators were not able to realize their potential impact because they spent too much time on the small things: explaining middleman costs to their customers, dealing with limited claims and support visibility, and working against inflexible integration timelines.
We forged a new model of the age-old Third-Party Administrator (TPA) to solve for these concerns. One that owns its own software, doesn’t charge add-on fees, eliminates the need for point-solutions by building in-house, and lets new health plans choose their own vendor stack without mark-ups, overrides, or proprietary relationships getting in the way.
Today we're announcing our $35M Series A, led by General Catalyst and Chemistry, with participation from Anthropic’s and Menlo Ventures’ Anthology Fund, Bain Future Back Ventures, Timeless Ventures, Lachy Groom, and Neo.
With these funds from our Series A we will be able to invest into building more products on top of the system-of-record we have built. By owning the source-of-truth data, we’re able to invest in software solutions for pricing, real-time payments, plan configuration, workflow orchestration, and process automation without the bottlenecks and uncertainties caused by external dependencies.
We’ve never believed in being a software layer or a point-solution. We’ve always wanted to go where the problem is and apply original thinking to health insurance. This took courage. We’re looking to hire people with this courage to build on the foundation.
None of this would mean anything without the plan designers who bet on us early. You trusted us, pushed us to build something genuinely better, and proved that bending the cost curve in healthcare is possible. This is only the beginning. Thank you.
Max, Ryan & Russell