Oscar, a health insurance company built on a full-stack technology platform, announced Thursday that it has closed a $140 million funding round led by Tiger Global Management.
A slew of other high-profile investors participated in the round, including Dragoneer, Baillie Gifford, Coatue, Founders Fund, Khosla, Lakestar and Reinvent. The financing comes less than six months after the company secured a $225 million funding round, and brings its total raised to over $1.6 billion, according to Crunchbase.
Axios reports that the latest round values the company at around $6 billion.
Joshua Kushner and Mario Schlosser founded Oscar in 2012 with the mission of “transforming how people interact with their health insurance company.” In September, Axios reported that the company had hired banks to help the firm go public in 2021.
Today, the New York-based company said it has seen a 74% increase in direct policy premiums over the past three years. As of Sept. 30, 2020, Oscar had approximately 420,000 members across 15 states.
Beginning in 2021, Oscar will be available in 18 states and 286 counties across its Individual and Family Plans, Medicare Advantage and Small group products.
The company cites high member engagement as one factor behind its success so far, claiming that its members have mobile app downloads that are approximately nine times the average of other insurers. Also, nearly 90% of its subscribing members have interacted with Oscar digitally, it says, giving the company a way “to get to know its members better and intervene to shift behavior in the direction of healthier and more affordable options.”
I’ve reached out to Oscar for more details and will update the article when I get them.
Meanwhile, the insurtech space only gets hotter. On Wednesday, we reported that Bestow had closed on a $70 million Series C to grow its digital life insurance platform.
In general, the insurtech space is one that has seen a number of high-profile IPOs (Root and Lemonade), SPACs (Metromile), M&As (MassMutual) and fundings. In the first six months of this year. Insurtech startups raised $2.5 billion, according to data from Crunchbase that FinLedger reported on here.