We’re thrilled to lead Arlo’s $4M seed round, with participation from good friends at 8VC and General Catalyst. I’m honored to join the board and support the team on their mission to help small businesses and their employees find affordable, comprehensive health insurance quickly.
Small businesses account for nearly half the private sector workers in the US, yet have long been stuck with expensive, subpar health insurance. The last 10 years saw 4.7% annual growth in health insurance premiums to cover a family, going from $15,849 in 2014 to a whopping $25,167 in 2024. This far outpaces inflation at 2.9% annually over the same period. Small businesses lack the negotiating power and cost-containment strategies available to larger employers. As a result, many SMBs churn through new insurance options every year, chasing temporary relief rather than building lasting, sustainable coverage for their teams.
When we first met Jan-Felix Schneider and Karthik Bhaskara, they were focused on improving access to healthcare — building software to help patients better navigate their health plan’s providers. As they dug in, it became clear that access was only one piece of the problem. Underwriting and quoting — the foundational infrastructure behind plan design and pricing — was stuck in the past. Legacy managing general underwriters (MGUs) — specialized entities that price and manage risk on behalf of insurers — relied on decades-old rating manuals (Claros, HealthMaps) and limited data inputs on the populations being covered. Imagine pages of actuarial tables, manual and one-size-fits-all processes that take weeks to turn around an insurance quote. Also, employees are grouped into broad risk categories while modern chronic disease management and lower-cost prescription programs aren’t taken into account. The result: mispriced risk, poor plan performance, and unpredictable renewals.
Arlo was created to address the above systemic issues. They're building with a long-term mindset — something healthcare desperately needs. Instead of chasing short-term premium gains or underwriting around denials, Arlo’s model aligns incentives around value-based care, proactive management, and long-term rate stability. Their AI-powered underwriting turns around quotes tailored to your employee population in minutes, not weeks. By integrating with advanced primary care and sourcing lower-cost specialty drugs, Arlo generates highly competitive rates and more comprehensive coverage. Small businesses can finally access the kind of healthcare infrastructure that was once only available to large employers.
Arlo Team
It takes a group of tireless, passionate rebels to buck the trend in such a legacy, entrenched industry. It’s been inspirational watching Jan-Felix, Karthik, and the whole Arlo team travel not to flashy healthcare innovation summits in Las Vegas or California but to small regional insurance conferences, working closely with small businesses and the brokers and third-party administrators that serve them to create a solution tailored to them. If you’re passionate about fixing healthcare for the 60 million Americans in small businesses supporting their local communities, join the team at Arlo they’re hiring.