Our Series B investment in Ideon (Vericred)

As we've all experienced first-hand this year, digital transformation is occurring all around us. The shift has been in process for many years, but it exploded into our collective realities during the pandemic. More than ever before, we shopped online, visited the doctor online, conducted business online, and even hung-out with friends online. Much of this virtual world was built years ago, with some tools and industries moving online a long time ago. Other sectors are just starting to see the benefits, as innovative companies deliver digital solutions and automated processes that reduce cost, complexity and errors versus traditional workflows.

One of those lagging sectors is health insurance and employee benefits - an enormous market that eclipses one trillion dollars, just in the US^[1]. Even at that massive size, the health insurance market has not yet been digitized. Employers contract brokers, who help them evaluate insurance plan options for their workforce, through mostly manual processes, and then purchase that insurance via paper (even if the selection was made digitally). It is an enormously inefficient process, held-back by proprietary standards and mindset, a lack of connectivity and capability to build connectivity, and general resistance to change across an enormously complex market.

Ideon (known as Vericred at the time of the Series B) delivers a solution to this challenge by providing the infrastructure needed, and by creating a market standard, to simplify the exchange of health insurance and employee benefits data for carriers and both their channel partners and end-customers. The Company's platform connects insurance technology solutions and insurance carriers through a suite of APIs that digitizes plan search, rate quoting and benefits search alongside enrollment, member management and renewal transactions.

We've been working with Ideon since early 2020, initially through a revenue-based financing investment, and have gotten a front-row seat to a rapid year of market digitization. Ideon spent this atypical year focused on the launch of their enrollment solution (formally released in September 2020), which further expands their platform and further improves efficiency in this enormous market. Earlier today, the Company announced its $23M Series B financing, which we were proud to participate in, alongside an incredible set of investors, all of which we feel bring enormous strategic value. We're excited about the future of Ideon, honored to be a part of the story, and ready and willing to help in any way we can.

[1] Private Health Insurance Spending, 2019 via CMS.gov