To tackle the Medicaid population, Columbus, Ohio-based insurtech startup Circulo Health is set to spread wings with $50 million funding from Drive Capital, General Catalyst, Oack HC/FT and SVB Capital. It is powered by Olive, an artificial intelligence unicorn that automates tedious tasks involved in healthcare organization management
- The startup, which is in its early days, is projecting itself as “the future of Medicaid,” the company said in its funding announcement that it is looking to disrupt the Medicaid Managed Care space by “bringing bold new approaches and Internet-scale technology” to Medicaid’s 75 million members.
- According to the company’s announcement, Circulo’s business will be built on the back of Olive’s tech platform, providing the young insurtech company with “automation, intelligence, network tools and AI coworker technologies.” Most of the founding investors of Circulo’s hold positions in Olive. What’s more, Olive CEO Sean Lane will also be holding the reigns of this new tech-driven push into the Medicaid space.
- “Circulo is going to use Olive’s unique platform to build the Medicaid insurance company of the future from scratch, right here in Columbus, Ohio – the emerging insurtech capital of the U.S.,” Lane said in a statement. “There’s no better place to build and grow a high-tech insurance company and there’s no better mission than to do it to serve the country’s most underserved population.”
- Circulo’s is charting its own new territory by focus on the Medicaid Managed Care population. The established big players in the sector- like Oscar Health- deal with individual, group and Medicare Advantage markets. Others include Bright Health, which raised half a billion to expand into small business plans in September, and Clover Health, which recently found itself fending off a critical short-seller report in the run-up to its special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger.