Gig Worker Benefits Platform Stride Health Announces $47 Million In New Funding

Stride Well being, a advantages platform designed particularly for unbiased employees, at present announced that it has raised $47 million to construct on its platform, develop membership, and increase partnerships and distribution channels. 

The corporate helps unbiased employees—freelancers, part-time employees, unbiased contractors, and different gig financial system employees who don’t get medical health insurance advantages by an employer—join medical health insurance by way of Healthcare.gov. It guides customers by well being plan choice and presents members different monetary advantages and steering. 

“The rationale we exist, what excites me and will get me away from bed on daily basis is that we want an individualized advantages system that pulls affordability, portability, and entry,” stated Noah Lang, Stride cofounder and CEO. “That’s why we’re right here.”

Thus far, Stride has enrolled 2.7 million members. To achieve unbiased employees, Stride companions with corporations that rely closely on gig employees, comparable to Uber, Amazon, DoorDash, Instacart, and GrubHub, amongst others.

This yr, Stride elevated medical health insurance enrollments 3.5 occasions over 2020, highlighting the chance to serve gig employees with advantages historically offered by employers. 

Whereas half the U.S. population gets health insurance through an employer, greater than one-third of the workforce works within the gig financial system full- or part-time, in accordance with Upwork.

Covid-19 solely accelerated People’ embrace of the gig financial system. Upwork’s information additionally confirmed that 12% of employees began freelancing in the course of the pandemic. And there could also be no turning again; 60% of people that had taken up freelancing reported that no sum of money would persuade them to take a standard job once more. 

However the pandemic additionally revealed cracks within the conventional employer profit system, in accordance with Lang. Individuals who misplaced their jobs and took up unbiased work have been pressured to search out their very own advantages or go with out protection in the course of the pandemic.

“If we had decoupled these issues extra constructively, most individuals [would] be higher off,” Lang stated.

The wants of unbiased employees will solely change into extra central within the U.S. By 2028, an estimated 90 million People can be freelancers.

Freelancing and different unbiased work presents flexibility and incomes energy, however leaves these employees with out the monetary advantages of conventional employment. 

“Whereas we’ve seen that form of unbundling of labor and earnings and advantages and security nets, we’ve not seen an improve or an replace to the way in which these advantages get delivered,” Lang stated. 

The trendy-day employer-sponsored medical health insurance system emerged in response to wage freezes throughout World Battle II and Lang says the system hasn’t stored up with altering occasions.

“We had this 70-year-old profit system that has not developed one bit,” he stated. “Whereas on the similar time, work has modified dramatically.”

Traders clearly see the enterprise alternative in redesigning worker advantages for employees outdoors of conventional full-time employment. 

“The pace at which Stride’s enterprise is scaling speaks to the urgency of the necessity and the worth that its platform delivers to this important, but underserved, phase of the U.S. financial system,” stated Megan Man, Basic Companion and Co-Founding father of King River Capital, in a press launch. 

Man will be a part of the Stride Board of Administrators, together with Opeyemi Oluwole, senior vp of Shopper Engagement at Teladoc, bringing the variety of ladies on the Board to 2. Like practically half of all venture-backed healthcare corporations, Stride beforehand had no ladies on the Board.

The most recent Sequence C funding, led by King River Capital together with Mastercard and Allstate, brings the corporate’s whole fundraising to $96 million. Earlier buyers embrace Venrock, NEA, Constancy’s F-Prime Capital, and Moderne Ventures.