TL;DR
Healia just announced $18M in funding. We're fixing a benefits system that has never worked the way dual-income families actually live. We're building in Columbus, Ohio, and we're hiring across sales, engineering, operations, and leadership. The best time to join was yesterday.
Don’t sleep on Columbus
I was the 15th employee at Root Insurance, the first product manager the company hired, and part of the team that scaled it to 1,500 people and a $6.5B IPO. I was the 20th employee at Olive AI, a healthcare AI company that reached a $4B+ valuation. Both of those companies were started here, in this city, by people who made a deliberate choice to do something extraordinary without leaving home.
When I decided to start Healia, I didn't think seriously about going anywhere else. I'm someone who has always been drawn to maximizing impact, and Columbus is where I know how to do that. The talent is here. The focus is here. The ability to build a tight, committed team without the noise and distraction of a saturated coastal market is here too. What the coasts have in visibility, we make up for in the quality of the work. We’re all in on Columbus.
Today, we're announcing $18 million in funding, including a $14M Series A led by 111° West Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, First Round Capital, Pioneer Fund, GoAhead Ventures, and North Coast Ventures. We've grown to hundreds of employer clients across the country, and we're just getting started.
The problem we're solving is real
When you buy a house, the bank looks at both incomes together. When you combine car insurance, you do it as a household. Roughly 30 million American dual-income families don't get that option with healthcare, one of the most consequential decisions a family makes. This is the choice that determines whether you can afford the specialist, whether the delivery is covered, whether a diagnosis becomes a financial crisis. Dual-income families still make it as two separate employees in two separate silos, with no way to see the full picture.
Most people navigate open enrollment the same way every year. They pick the plan they had last year, or the one that looks least confusing, and move on. Not because it's the right decision for their family, but because evaluating the alternative feels like more risk than it's worth. The enemy you know. The system was never designed to help you choose well.
And the family isn't the only one paying for that broken system. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average employer contributes roughly $20,000 toward family coverage annually, a number that has risen 6% or more for three consecutive years, outpacing inflation. Meanwhile family deductibles remain high too: the Kaiser Family Foundation reported the average deductible is up 17% over five years and 43% over ten. HR leaders are caught between CFO pressure to cut benefits costs and a genuine obligation to the people they serve. Most are navigating that tension without good options.
Our product, the Total Care Option, solves that for both sides. It enables employers to pay for the out-of-pocket costs and premiums of any employee who chooses to enroll in their spouse's health plan rather than the company's. The average employer saves 76% per enrolled household annually, and the employee gets up to 100% of their health costs covered. We handle setup, employee education, and claims reimbursement end to end. To date, employers using Healia have provided $33M in additional coverage to their employees, and that number grows every month.
This is what mission-first looks like
Everyone here works for the company mission first. Our engineers build tools that make the sales team more effective. Our operations team thinks about the customer experience at every step. Our account executives and account managers ground their approach in what is genuinely best for the customer. We even built technology that helps families compare options, even when it may not be to Healia’s advantage. That’s the kind of company we are.
In practice, that looks like this:
- Honesty. We'd rather tell you something hard now than let a problem quietly compound. We expect the same in return: from teammates, from partners, from ourselves.
- Focus. Every level of the company knows its most important problem and works on that first. That's how we move quickly, in the same direction.
- Collaboration: We are highly collaborative but fiercely independent. Nobody works alone, and nobody waits for permission.
Who we’re looking for
The hardest part of building a company is finding people who care as much as you do about what you're building and who you're building it with. We've been fortunate to find a lot of those people already and we're looking for more.
There is no better career catalyst than working at a startup. At this stage, you have direct access to people who become harder to reach once hierarchy becomes necessary. You're given real responsibility and genuine autonomy, and you move at a pace that compounds your growth in ways a larger organization simply can't match. The work you do here will matter to the company immediately, and the relationships you build will stay with you long after.
"The best time to join a startup was yesterday."
If the following matter to you, we should talk:
- Working on a problem that affects millions of families.
- Autonomy and responsibility without waiting to earn it.
- A team where curiosity and directness are the baseline.
- Building something in Columbus that proves this city belongs on the map.
If you're excited about healthcare, want to work on problems that have a real and tangible impact on how families experience one of the most stressful parts of their lives, and are eager to do it alongside a team that moves with urgency and genuinely takes care of each other, I'd love to hear from you. Columbus is not an underdog city for much longer. Come be part of what we're building here.
“Columbus is not an underdog city for much longer”
We're growing fast, these roles exist because demand outgrew the team. If you don't see your exact title below, reach out at careers@healiahealth.com.