Naveen Selvadurai, the Foursquare co-founder who left the company last year, has found a new role at Oscar, the health insurance startup co-founded by Thrive Capital's Joshua Kushner. The startup just raised $40 million ahead of sweeping changes to U.S. health insurance regulations that go into effect next year.
Selvadurai came on board within the last month and is now working there full-time. He’s running the company’s mobile team ahead of a slated January launch. However, we hear that Selvadurai continues to harbor ambitions to do his own startup again, so it’s unclear how long he will stay with Oscar.
Nevertheless, he’s passionate about the space. Earlier this year, he opened up a “personal API” that shows his sleep patterns, weight, steps, food intake, and activity levels. When he launched it, he wrote:
“as i've gotten older, i started getting more interested in tracking my health and fitness. when we are young and in our twenties, we can get away with pretty much anything. but like everyone else, the older i get, the more i realize i only have one body – and that i should try to keep it tuned to get the most performance out of it.”
Oscar now has 35 people, half of whom are focused on technology, data, and design. The other half are healthcare executives focused on product. Co-founders Mario Schlosser, Kevin Nazemi, and Josh Kushner are leading operations along with chief technology officer Fredrik Nylander, who used to be the head of engineering and operations at Tumblr.
Oscar recently won approval to open as a health insurance operator in New York, where it will launch first. Although the team remains quiet on the nature of the product, it is billing itself as a “modern health insurer” that will take advantage of design and data to humanize and simplify the consumer experience with health insurance.
They are not a front-end for existing health insurance providers. They are actually their own operator and $29 million of the massive initial round they raised is not going toward operations. It is instead being kept on reserve in compliance with state regulations for health insurance providers.
Oscar has raised money from Thrive, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund and other angels.
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