Osigu raises $7.5M to speed up health insurance claims

Miami — Osigu, a real-time claims processing and e-prescription platform in Latin America, announced today that it closed on $7.5 million in funding led by IDC Ventures and followed by strategic investors including Jose Vargas, co-founder of Healthcare.com, a leading digital health insurance company. To date, the company has raised about $12 million.

Osigu aims to solve the wait time between getting pre-authorized for a medical procedure, which can go from several days to weeks depending on the nature of the procedure and the companies involved, and actually getting the procedure. That’s in part because it’s largely still done manually today.

The company seeks to eliminate the need for tedious phone calls, filling out paper forms, and conforming to numerous payers web portals. As a result, payers and providers minimize administrative and back-office costs, reduce fraud, and patients get timely access to care.

“With Osigu we connect directly to the core system of the provider and the core system of the insurance company, and in real time we can say if you have coverage or not,” said Fernando Botrán, founder and CEO of Osigu.

The company, which launched in Guatemala in 2016, recently relocated its headquarters to Miami. It has 43 employees and the company has experienced 25% year over year revenue growth. It currently has 9 clients comprising insurance companies and third party administrators.

It plans to use the money from this round to improve their algorithms, work on a AI product, ramp up just signed deals and expand to Colombia which is a $12 billion market with more than 700 million annual transactions. “We’re going after 30-40% of the market,” said Botrán

To make the business work, Osigu charges a fee per transaction to the insurance company and then offers providers to advance their payment in 24 hrs, charging a fee for that, too. “We have also raised a $60 million line of credit to advance the payment to providers,” Botrán explained.

“Right now we’re working on transactions, but in the future we can see ourselves as a data company because with real data in real time, insurers can make individual plans and services for wellness and preventive care,” Botrán added

The idea and the need for Osigu came from an experience that Botrán had in his previous venture. Before starting Osigu, Botrán founded a company called GiftTop, which was a cross border company where instead of sending money you could send a virtual gift card. He had a pharmacy as a client, and the pharmacy owner asked him if he had something similar but that could solve the pre-authorization problem

“I thought it was going to be easier, but when I got into this industry, I realized it was really complex. But I saw a clear need for it, so I went for it.”