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New Delhi (India), September 14: QubeHealth (“Qube”) is a Mumbai headquartered company on a mission to give Indians better control of their healthcare bills. By aggregating healthcare providers, financing companies, and Indian corporates, Qube empowers employed Indians to borrow easily and pay quickly for any health or medical expense. Qube’s product is only available through employers in India.
QubeHealth has partnered with over 200 of India’s largest employers, over 600 brands of health service providers, and over 11,000 hospitals, clinics, and doctors, making it arguably India’s largest healthcare marketplace.
QubeHealth is a Pre-Series-A funded company, with investments from Inflection Point Ventures, Keiretsu Forum, Axiomatic Ventures, New Horizon Ventures, Mr. Mohit Burman (Chairman of Dabur India Ltd.), and other prominent Indian and International angel investors.
In a freewheeling chat with Startup Story, Chris George, Co-Founder and CEO- of QubeHealth, talks about the company and its unique offering.
What is the problem that Qube is trying to solve?
Paying for healthcare is a pain. You have to make sense of your complex health insurance – if you have any insurance – and then arrange the balance money from your savings or borrowings. Indians spend over INR 2 Lakh Crore a year, from their pockets, on healthcare services to pay for any healthcare bill not covered by their family’s health insurance. Even if you have the money, it will not make sense to use your credit cards and then convert that bill to a high-cost EMI or redeem your savings because it is not guaranteed that you will get the best healthcare choices OR a faster discharge at a hospital.
So, the problems to solve are two-fold: Access to quick money, preferably at no cost, and the ability to pay any such healthcare bill with minimal friction. Qube is taking a slice of this market, bridging the gap between healthcare payments and health insurance coverage and changing how you pay for healthcare.
So what is Qube?
QubeHealth is a healthcare payments company that helps you to pay for your family’s health & medical bills that are not covered by your health insurance. You get a medical finance credit line that you can borrow as you need, pay no interest and no fees, paying back at your convenience in a month or a year for amounts you use from their credit line. You can also use your money to pay through the Qube App and get a discount cashback on every payment.
What are the conditions?
The company you work for has to subscribe to QubeHealth so you can get this service. In that sense, it is exclusive to employees of such organizations and not available to everyone. The other condition is that you can use QubeHealth-Credit only for health and medical bills.
How does Qube do this?
Qube has aggregated corporates, their employees, healthcare financers, and healthcare service providers in a single platform. Over 270 large companies in India have already signed up to offer Qube to offer it to their employees – over 3 Lakh paid subscribers. Qube’s users can pay any medical bill at any doctor, clinic, or hospital in India and get special benefits for choosing the 12,000+ health service providers that QubeHealth has a special partnership with.
How did the idea happen?
QubeHealth is founded by Chris George and Gagan Kapur, friends and successful entrepreneurs who brought their respective experiences from complementary industries. Gagan’s family-owned India’s second largest Insurance TPA (a TPA is a back-office company that processes insurance claims), and Chris built technology companies over two decades. Both experienced the scare of Cancer in their family, and it pushed them to think that solving the healthcare problem in India meant solving the healthcare financing problem first. Through QubeHealth, they want to give control back to the hands of us Indias, helping us have better access and choice to take care of our family’s healthcare.
What is the vision of QubeHealth for the next 3-5 years?
Over the next three years, QubeHealth expects to ‘activate’ US$ 2 Billion in healthcare credit to over a million Indian households. This means that a million homes, accessed through the earning member of that household, will have a medical line of credit available to them at no cost, which they can draw down as needed to pay for everyday medical expenses and emergencies. They could also use this to pay for health insurance premiums.
Over the next 1.5 years, QubeHealth will be ubiquitous at most health or medical merchants in India, offering Users the ability to “Pay thru Qube” or “Qube Karo”, where the User can use their own money to pay and earn discount cashback on every healthcare payment, OR borrow instantly and convert to no-cost EMIs of their choice.