Nayya, a benefits decision-support company, is reinventing the way consumers choose and use their benefits.Through personalized, AI-driven insights and year-round guidance, the New York-based company is helping to reduce the opacity surrounding health care and the benefits enrollment process.
The result: employees with greater physical, mental, and financial well-being.
“Our mission is to give Americans peace on their best days and confidence on their worst as it relates to health and finances,” says Aman Magoon, vice president of product and founding team member. “There is an inextricable link between one’s physical well-being and financial well-being. The decisions we make at the intersection of our health and our benefits have meaningful impacts on our financial security, so Nayya has built two software products that look to improve this decision-making process for employees.”
Choosing and Using Health Care
Nayya consists of two product options: Choose and Use. With AI technology, Nayya can create a highly personalized benefits enrollment experience. Nayya’s decision-support product is called Choose and helps consumers enroll in benefit programs through a simple, guided enrollment process. By using Choose, consumers can make intelligent, data-driven decisions during open enrollment, new employee onboarding, and qualifying life events.
Nayya’s health care financial planning application, Use, helps drive benefits engagement throughout the year. With proactive reminders and nudges, Use enables consumers to make the most of their benefits, actively helping them to understand their benefits, how to use them, and how to save money.
“Nayya Choose does a great job of helping employees feel good about picking a plan, but health care questions continue throughout the year, not just once,” Magoon says. Nayya Choose helps employees decide which doctors to visit, determine which digital health care options are covered, and learn how to pay for unexpected medical bills.
The software analyzes an individual’s medical history, current benefits enrollment, and claims data to help manage health care costs and ensure they are prepared for all scenarios. For example, a member may have linked visit history into Nayya, including OB-GYN visits. If that visit history indicates the member is pregnant, Nayya can send information to the member about their employer’s family leave policy, what their insurance covers for labor and delivery, and more helpful information.
Founded in Insurance
While Nayya aims to help members improve their physical and financial well-being, the company was originally founded as a tool for insurance firms. In 2019, Sina Chehrazi and Akash Magoon founded a startup that provided insurance companies with detailed insights about members, such as salary, level of physical activity, etc.
“During their tenure, they had great success improving underwriting,” Aman Magoon says. “But what if their model was flipped upside down, and instead of empowering the underwriter with information about the member, you gave the member more information on their benefits? Once they realized that, it was obvious they needed to start an organization based around this mission.”
Aman Magoon joined Chehrazi and Akash Magoon in 2020, when Nayya’s software was under development. The first prototype was launched at the end of that year.
In 2021, Nayya was named the most promising U.S. insurtech company by Insurtech Insights Future50 Awards.
“For Nayya, success isn’t measured in terms of awards,” Aman Magoon says. “The number of Americans engaging with the software and adhering to the advice and guidance we are giving is our No. 1 success metric. Even if we’re generating revenue, the ultimate truth lies in consumer adoption.”
In March 2022, Nayya secured a Series C round of funding, which will enable the company to distribute its software more widely.
“As we move into the next phase of our history,” Magoon says, “we are primarily focused on thinking about building products in the most consumer-centric way.”
A Stellar User Experience
When it comes to barriers to entry, the biggest challenge for Nayya isn’t convincing employers that their software is useful and necessary — it’s demonstrating that the user experience doesn’t bog down HR teams.
“As an HR professional, one may be required to interact with half a dozen unique systems to perform day-to-day activities,” Magoon says. “The primary challenge we face is creating a solution that has the best user experience and streamlines the HR and employee journey.”
To solve this issue, Nayya has formed partnerships with HR tech platforms, most recently ADP, to embed the software directly into its management platform.
Decision support in the health care field isn’t new; it has existed for more than a decade. But Nayya has a leg up on its competition due to its data analysis and personalized suggestions.
“The primary differentiator between Nayya and incumbent technology in this space is that our product philosophy centers around personalized decision support,” Magoon says.
One company Nayya took inspiration from was Amazon — specifically its homepage.
“When you personalize experiences by allowing employees to see things like what they’ve spent in the past, whether their favorite doctors are in-network, or how where they live impacts life insurance, you reduce the barrier to making smart decisions,” Magoon says.
“What Nayya centers around is solving a problem that is ubiquitous. Nearly all of us have experienced or know someone who has experienced financial issues with managing their health. There are a ton of tech solutions out there, but never has a software existed that holistically personalizes financial planning around health care. Solving that issue is where we get a lot of our moxie.”