Mayank Kale and Amrit Singh's Loop is filling the gaps in health insurance

The duo had developed a software that created digital health records of patients and had already deployed it in Gadchiroli in rural Maharashtra. Asha workers were able to register patients, pull up the records of existing ones and prescribe the right medicines, all with a few clicks on their tablets, rather than sifting through piles of papers. They also deployed the device in Sierra Leone and Uzbekistan, all for free—thanks to some grants they had received from the University.

“That gave us the confidence that we can build software, deploy it and get users on board,” says Kale.

Soon after they graduated they returned to India and started building more applications, including one that connected physicians to specialists.

Through it all, one constant kept coming up: That incentives in health care are broken, says Kale. “The health care system has financial incentives to overprescribe medications and surgeries. I witnessed how people suffered due to lack of medical education,” he says.

Plus the market seemed ripe for disruption. Consider how only 10 percent of the Indian population has a family doctor. “That puts them on the wrong health care path at the outset,” says Singh.

Or consider how workplace health insurance plans grew by roughly 35 percent last year while individual (or retail) health insurance plans de-grew by 2 percent. And even so, the former often leave employees grappling with high medical bills for out-of-network services, simply because they don’t know who to access for their insurance plans and at the time of an emergency, it’s “just too much to handle”, says Singh.

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All this led Kale and Singh to develop Loop, a platform that bundles health insurance coverage for employees with access to a primary care doctor, unlimited free consultations, and discounted diagnostics. They’ve also thrown into the mix perks like online yoga sessions.

So, Loop serves as a broker between the company and the insurance provider; the company pays a lump sum premium to the insurer at the start of the year and Loop gets a commission from the insurer for bringing in the company. Loop’s revenues are growing 4x year-on-year, according to the founders.

View the full list of Forbes India 30 Under 30 2023 here

Loop has raised over $40 million so far from top tier investors, including Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Elevation Capital, YC Continuity Fund and Tribe Capital.

The team has looped in 600 companies across Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Pune so far, and is presently piloting physical Loop clinics where employees can pop in for a check-up.

“The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Mayank and Amrit is mission driven. They have been deep in the Indian health ecosystem for a long time on their mission to provide affordable health insurance and amazing health care to millions of Indians… I have been privileged to see them relentlessly execute on this mission,” says Mayank Khanduja, partner at Elevation Capital.

With 450,000 employees and their families using Loop, Kale and Singh have sure got people covered.