Announcing Even’s Seed Round

Today is a great day for Even as we announce our $5 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Founders Fund (led by Peter Thiel), Lachy Groom and other investors and operators including Nikesh Arora (CEO, Palo Alto Networks, ex-COO, Softbank), Kunal Shah (CEO, CRED) Nithin Kamath (Founder, Zerodha) Tom Stafford (Partner, DST Global).

This is the first investment in India by Nikesh Arora and Founders Fund that have previously invested in companies such as Stripe, SpaceX, Airbnb and Facebook.

We are thrilled to have the support of some of the world’s leading investors, and we are even more excited that they share our mission to revolutionise healthcare in India. 

“Even has a unique model that is better for hospitals, insurers and most importantly for consumers. We couldn’t be more excited about this opportunity and to back this exceptional team.”

Vinod Khosla

Founder, Khosla Ventures

We believe every Indian should have access to 360 degree, high quality healthcare that does not bankrupt them. No one should ever have to choose between their health and their savings. We are a healthcare provider that partners directly with the top hospitals in the country to offer unlimited diagnostics, consultations and 50 lakh worth of hospitalisations all with one monthly subscription cost. If the doctor says you need it, it’s covered!

The beginning 

Even was born as a project of our three co-founders and best friends, Mayank, Matilde and Alessandro. 

Mayank, who was born in India, had a firsthand experience of just how bad it can get when you discover a critical illness in the family. With or without health insurance, families are plunged into debt–all while trying to cope with the emotional stress of watching a loved one fight for their life at the hospital.

He moved to the UK and met Matilde (with whom he started a VC- backed machine learning startup; this is their second venture together!) and subsequently Alessandro (Matilde’s best friend since primary school 🧡). 

In the UK and Europe, the three never had to worry about healthcare, because the countries have a very robust public healthcare system. Which means they never had to pay out of pocket when they visited a doctor or a hospital. 

It was not until Matilde and Mayank got to India for a research project that they realised how starkly different healthcare was in the country. Doctor consultations were chargeable and pretty expensive in a city like Bangalore or Delhi, diagnostics were not covered by insurance, getting admitted to a hospital meant worrying about being overtreated or undertreated, filing reams of paperwork, wasting time talking to your insurance agent, and walking out of the hospital after having paid miscellaneous expenses that ran into thousands if not lakhs even if covered by personal health insurance.

So they called Alessandro, who at the time was doing research in machine learning at Google DeepMind and the trio decided to build Even to fix this.

Speaking to friends also revealed the unwillingness to buy insurance. Insurance policies were designed to confuse. The whole experience of buying and using insurance left something to be desired.

These biases were also confirmed when they looked at the data. Private individual insurance penetration was abysmally low: less than 1% (2017) compared to ~68% in developed countries like the US. 

Moreover, Indians still paid 60% of their total health expenses out of their pockets. A 2018 study found that this out-of-pocket health spending pushed 55 million people into poverty in the previous year.

Then the pandemic happened and it emptied more pockets as it wiped out a significant chunk of the Indian population. Out of the 54 million people across the world driven out of the middle class and into poverty in 2020, 32 million people were from India. 

India needed an out and Even could be the escape hatch. 

In 2019 Matilde, Mayank and Alessandro started studying the insurance industry in detail, conducting user research and building a team of experts who were passionate about finding novel solutions to fixing health insurance in India. 

As first two hires, they got some of the most talented domain experts in India: Raunak, who’s been Chief Risk officer at three standalone health insurers and is on the board of Institute of Actuaries of India and Animesh, who runs operations for the second largest hospital chain in India, Narayana Health. They also met with hospital executives who told their side of the story: constant friction with insurers over claims and pricing, delays in reimbursements, helping uninsured patients who simply could not afford to pay.

It was clear that the traditional insurance model did not serve either hospitals or patients. So Even set out to partner directly with hospitals that would guarantee care to patients. 

Unlike insurance companies that profit if your claims are denied, Even takes a flat fee and uses all the remaining membership money to cover members’ hospital bills. Even also rewards hospitals for actively looking after members and keeping them healthier in the long run.

In the end, for a small monthly fee, patients get truly cashless, top-of-the-line care (unlimited OPD and diagnostics and a 50 lakh hospital cover) from the best hospitals in India without paying anything extra out of pocket or worrying about being overtreated or undertreated. 

Hospitals are incentivised to keep members healthy in the long run by carrying out preventive checks (OPD and diagnostics) and mitigating risks early on (by employing care at early stages of the disease) to minimise future costs and subsequently increase their profit share. Patient’s well-being and hospital incentives are now aligned.

Building Even into the future

This initial investment allows us to accelerate our plans to provide real solutions to an extremely challenging problem. 

We intend to go live in Bangalore this year, grow our customer base in the city and bring in India’s best hospitals and labs in our network. At the same time, we are working towards expanding into other Tier 1 cities in India. We are constantly working towards building features into our product that serve our members and remove any friction in joining our membership service.

Interest in our company is growing every day with c. 5000 sign-ups since we opened our waitlist in June this year. Our maiden vaccination program in Bangalore was a huge success with the over 1500+ vaccines administered in two days.

We are inspired every day by people reaching out to us to extend their support to our mission. Two years ago, we were just three people with a dream and now we are a 18-member strong team of passionate people who want to build India’s best health cover with us. Our team members have been pivotal at multiple unicorns including: Pharmeasy, Grofers, Unacademy as well as holding senior positions at Google and Microsoft.

We continue to attract top talent in the country through our transparent and exhaustive hiring philosophy. 

If our story and our mission speaks to you please read this and apply to our open positions.

If you want to be the first one to hear about the latest updates, join our waitlist 🧡 Help us spread the word on Twitter 🐦 or Instagram.