Yuzu Health

Yuzu Health

Claims Adjusting, Actuarial Services

New York, NY 790 followers

Earning trust by facilitating new ways to access and pay for healthcare covered by insurance.

About us

Healthcare in the US is deeply fractured. Between when someone sees a doctor and when insurance pays the bill, there is a dizzying amount of negotiating and coordination that has resulted in an opaque and extremely rigid system reliant on vendors on top of vendors. We're on a mission to simplify health plan administration from the ground up, starting with claims processing as a third-party administrator. We believe not only that AI can streamline all the manual processes but that it will also enable more innovative plan designs to come to market with different covered services and incentive structures. Healthcare needs new ideas in how to deliver care, and we're building the foundations to enable just that. If you're interested in solving extremely hard problems with even harder solutions, check out our open positions at yuzu.health/careers

Website
https://yuzu.health
Industry
Claims Adjusting, Actuarial Services
Company size
11-50 employees
Headquarters
New York, NY
Type
Privately Held
Founded
2022

Locations

Employees at Yuzu Health

Updates

  • Yuzu Health reposted this

    View profile for Russell Pekala, graphic

    Operations at Yuzu Health

    We're hiring an Abstraction Engineer at Yuzu Health. Yuzu's company mission is to make health insurance SIMPLE. We do this by enabling new ways of getting healthcare expenses paid for by insurance. For health insurance plans built on top of Yuzu, members can natively and easily get a virtual credit card to spend on approved services so that they can skip the wait and the bureaucracy of dealing with "billing departments" and get care that is priced fairly. We build the tools and logic to understand how much can be paid for various services as well as processing the payments behind the millions of dollars per year spent by our employer customers. We are not an "add on" or "wrapper". We don't just move money around. We pay claims and make tough decisions and we're proud of that. We built our own claims processing system so that we can build using new technologies with less bloat. As an Abstraction Engineer, you will come in with the mandate of making our systems simple. You will be the type of person who loves finding elegant abstractions, refactoring code, and designing architecture to support feature engineers. We have about 3 years of runway and a lean team of 7 based in NYC. This is the hardest technical problem I've ever worked on applied to the hardest moral and policy problem of our generation -- making healthcare affordable, unbureaucratic, and fair.

    Abstraction Engineer

    yuzu.health

  • View organization page for Yuzu Health, graphic

    790 followers

    Listen to Plan Designer Richard Walton CEBS describe how simple his Maverick Strategy health plan is. Yuzu serves as the low-overhead cash-payment and accounting engine that pays doctors immediately for services letting them spend time with patients and not revenue cycle headaches. Health insurance networks are inefficient revenue cycle overhead. Nearly every doctor and facility takes cash, and at a cheaper rate than insurance. https://lnkd.in/eA2sQxzW

    THE CHAT: Local insurance expert changing the way healthcare works

    THE CHAT: Local insurance expert changing the way healthcare works

    newschannel10.com

  • Yuzu Health reposted this

    View profile for Russell Pekala, graphic

    Operations at Yuzu Health

    Happy to share that Yuzu will be speaking at The Maverick Strategy Unveiling Event on May 9th! It'll be my first time in West Texas, and I can't imagine a better person to show me the town than Richard Walton CEBS. He's been a leader in the Amarillo community for 10+ years getting employers access to innovative health plans like Sana and Sedera. Now Richard is designing a plan using all of his knowledge and Yuzu Health's payment and technology capabilities. We can't wait to talk about it!

    View profile for Richard Walton CEBS, graphic

    Laser focused on solving the affordability crisis in American healthcare

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  • View organization page for Yuzu Health, graphic

    790 followers

    We're proud to have Russell Pekala on the Self-Funded with Spencer podcast. Russell Pekala was driven to do customer support at Yuzu because he's seen how deeply impersonal and byzantine BUCA plans are for members firsthand.

    View profile for 🎙Spencer Smith, CSFS®, graphic

    📈 SVP - ParetoHealth || 🎙️ Host - Self-Funded w/ Spencer || ✍️ “Self-Fund or Die”

    A spilled bowl of ramen led Russell Pekala to co-found Yuzu Health. When Russell's brother spilled some super-hot ramen on his leg and suffered a burn, he went to his local hospital, where it was treated as a severe burn. His brother was then sent a $180,000 bill. Russell, who at the time knew nothing about the healthcare system, immediately started looking into how to save his brother from this crazy bill. With some quick research and negotiating, Russell was able to get $136,000 knocked off the bill, with the rest being charged to his brother's plan. The moral of the story? Be careful when you're eating ramen. Check out the newest episode of Self-Funded with Spencer, featuring Russell Pekala, available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts are found. #healthcare #healthinsurance #startups #technology #costcontrol #pharmacy #employers #predictivedata #wearables #futureofinsurance #selffunded #podcast

  • Yuzu Health reposted this

    View profile for Ben Butler, graphic

    Building a Better Healthcare System from Scratch @ HIPnation

    Saturday morning health plan designing with the guys from Yuzu Health! I can’t think of a better way to spend my birthday. Thanks for making the trip guys! Russell Pekala Will Gillach It’s rare to work with folks so aligned with our mission. Cheers to fixing big problems, instead of just talking about them!! Y’all are the real deal. 💪🏼 Brian E. Hill, MD HIPnation

    • No alternative text description for this image
  • Yuzu Health reposted this

    View profile for Will Gillach, graphic

    Powering More Affordable Health Plans

    It's a cool day at Yuzu HQ. How often does your health plan refund you or your employer at the end of the year? With 2023 in the books, many employers' annual health plans have concluded. And that includes the first set of beta customers who placed their trust in Yuzu Health as their health insurance plan for the 2023 plan year. One powerful part of self-funded and level-funded health plans, such as Yuzu's, is the fact that the employer is entitled to any unspent funds at the end of the year. So guess what? Yuzu customers who prioritized their health and worked with us to get affordable, yet high quality, care when needed -- they get their money back. Money they can use to grow their business and invest in their employees. I've never been happier to cut a check than to these folks. Here at Yuzu, we're far from perfect (we're working through a couple customer support cases as I type this up). But we're learning fast and are fully committed to doing right on behalf of employers and their employees. Here's to putting them first in 2024 :) And the biggest shoutout to Max, Pam, Ryan, and Russell for pushing the boundaries every day and having a blast along the way. I'm thankful for you.

    • No alternative text description for this image
  • View organization page for Yuzu Health, graphic

    790 followers

    In line with our low-margin ethos, we shopped around heavily for business insurance. Sparx gave us the best deals and the best service. Having good business insurance is key to our ability to get licensed to process health insurance claims and attract the trust of customers!

  • View organization page for Yuzu Health, graphic

    790 followers

    View profile for Max Kauderer, graphic

    Co-Founder at Yuzu Health

    Health insurance used to be simple. Everything that makes a health plan complicated was at one point designed to save money and make it simpler. Included in this are the relatively recent "innovations" of network, utilization management, deductibles, coinsurance, coverage exclusions, RBR, pharmacy benefit managers, etc. Similarly, every law touching healthcare was designed to make it simpler and cheaper but has added myriad complexity to plan operations, plan design, and underwriting. For incumbents operating in this system for the past 20+ years, these evolutions have been addressed with bandaids instead of tech re-designs, resulting in extremely brittle technology and an endless stream of hard-coded one off rules. Yuzu Health believes that by starting from scratch, with the benefit of hindsight about the constraints of the current system, we are able to design the infrastructure to power health plans more intelligently, leveraging modern technology to save employers money while improving member experience.

    Powered by $5M investment, startup Yuzu Health takes on insurers' 'brittle' technology

    Powered by $5M investment, startup Yuzu Health takes on insurers' 'brittle' technology

    fiercehealthcare.com

  • View organization page for Yuzu Health, graphic

    790 followers

    Yuzu loves transparency, and in that spirit here is the pitch deck that we used to bring our product to life! Thanks Samantha Stokes for the press coverage of our insurance coverage!

    View profile for Samantha Stokes, graphic

    Senior VC and startups reporter at Business Insider

    Self-funding is often the reason why so many big tech firms and other large companies can offer good health insurance to employees and include benefits such as mental health services and telemedicine. But the process has long been unattainable for startups and small businesses, Max Kauderer recently explained to me. That's where his new company, Yuzu Health, comes in: the startup, which just raised $5 million, is using AI to tackle the administrative burden of administering a self-funded healthcare plan, unlocking the process for other startups. Up on Insider, take an exclusive look at the pitch deck Yuzu Health used to raise its funding round from investors including Lachy Groom, Altman Capital, Day One Ventures, and a bunch of angel founders and operators.

    Here's an exclusive look at the pitch deck that Yuzu Health, which offers AI-powered health plans for startups, used to raise $5 million from investors including Lachy Groom and Altman Capital

    Here's an exclusive look at the pitch deck that Yuzu Health, which offers AI-powered health plans for startups, used to raise $5 million from investors including Lachy Groom and Altman Capital

    businessinsider.com

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Funding

Yuzu Health 2 total rounds

Last Round

Seed

US$ 5.0M

Investors

Lachy Groom
See more info on crunchbase