Catching up with Rachel Lyubovitzky, CEO of New Providence Startup EverythingBenefits
When NJTechWeekly.com first met Rachel Lyubovitzky several years ago, she was pitching her startup EverythingBenefits (New Providence) at various meetups in the state. Lyubovitzky had an idea for a benefits marketplace aimed at human resources (HR) departments at companies. She and her cofounders had all been in the business of building tech companies in the benefits world, so they had a great deal of domain experience.
Fast forward to 2018, and EverythingBenefits has grown to almost 100 employees, with 43 of them based in New Jersey. It serves 2,300 corporate organizations with a combined total of a half million employees, and about a million people through channel partners and a direct to market strategy. The startup partners with major players, like Kronos (Lowell, Mass.) and Infinisource (Coldwater, Mich.), and with many smaller players in the market.
EverythingBenefits began its investment journey with an angel round, mostly funded by customers who understood the company’s vision and wanted to get behind it. EverythingBenefits then sought venture capital funding. Last summer, it received $4 million from Arthur Ventures,(Minneapolis).
Lyubovitzky notes that, “compared with just about any other experience, such as online banking or online shopping, the ability to buy or choose benefits is so much worse.” EverythingBenefits is out to change all that.
Q: What exactly does EverythingBenefits do?
RL: For corporations, we help our customers make their benefit offerings both more robust and easier to consume for all kinds of corporate users. Some of them might have HR departments, but the benefits piece is missing. Or they might have the benefits piece, but they are missing COBRA administration. Our customers generally pick and choose products to complement what they already have to offer. We then integrate with them to facilitate data movement between their systems and ours.
Some of our channel partners white label or license our solutions so they can be the first line of support to their customers. For others, we are the primary source of support for their customers. Our ultimate goal and mission is to transform the benefits experience, something that affects everyone, to make it simple, fulfilling and less error-prone.
Q: Why do companies need your services?
RL: One of the main challenges in the benefits industry is that communications between players are mostly broken. You have close to 1,000 insurance carriers and providers offering medical, business, life insurance, etc. Each one of them may use different formats. It’s as though they were each speaking a different language. There is a semblance of one “language” nation-wide in medical related to the Affordable Care Act reforms, but there is no such thing for ancillary services such as vision or dental. On the other side, you have the world of HR, which wants and needs to provide benefits, but doesn’t want to learn a thousand languages in order to communicate with all the providers. We take care of that. We have direct connectivity with over 600 carriers. When an employee has a baby, gets married or leaves the workforce, we are able to communicate that information to its final destination without the client worrying about the logistics of doing it themselves. Once communications are fixed, you can do a multitude of wonderful things.
Q: What is driving your growth as a startup?
RL: As a nation, we have the lowest unemployment in a century. So, employers are looking for more and more creative ways to attract and retain employees. That is what’s fueling the growth of benefits from our standpoint. We are seeing the growth of tuition reimbursements and signing bonuses. Employers are getting very creative to become attractive places for their employees to work. Benefits are the biggest lever, but it is hard to operate without the right automation. That is what’s driving our growth.
The EverythingBenefits Team at the company’s 3rd birthday party | Courtesy EverythingBenefits
Q: Did you develop your core technology in New Jersey?
RL: We have the same technology leaders that built the prior company [SaaShr.com LLC] with us, including Dmitry Korsunsky, cofounder and chief information and security officer, and Daniil Fishteyn, cofounder and chief technology officer.
Q: What solutions do you offer?
RL: Our solutions fall into three key categories: Benefits Made Simple, Cost Containment and Analytics and Connected Living. For example, Benefits Enrollment/Management, a solution under Benefits Made Simple, allows employees to self-serve enroll in new benefits or update their benefits during life-changing events, such as having a baby. Our COBRA Administration solution helps companies transition those who have lost their jobs due to termination or other related events so that they can continue their healthcare. We have Automated New Hire Reporting services so that we can automatically report when new people are hired to state agencies.
Our Benefits Reconciliation service lets us reconcile the carriers’ invoices with enrollment information to quickly highlight any enrollment and billing irregularities. This is very important because we can tell employers, “You have terminated employees still showing up on the list. You have to tell the insurance provider about it.” Equally important is identifying those employees who may not be enrolled in the right plan or who do not have their dependents covered.
We have a billing and payments service that enables self-billed employers to create and pay their own insurance bills. We have a commission tracker for brokers. Finally, as a part of our Connected Living category, we can communicate with over a thousand providers and any of the 401k, 401B and third-party administrators (TPAs) out there.
Q: What do you think has been the biggest driver for your success?
RL: The biggest voices inspiring us and directing our vision are our customers and channel partners. They are the ultimate consumers of our solutions and bring tons of ideas and insights that drive innovation in our group. They may say, “I spend a week out of a month reconciling the paper invoices we get from our insurance carriers with our benefits enrollments. There has got to be a better way to do it.” That is one of the examples of what inspired our Benefits Reconciliation solution, and there are many more.
Q: What’s next for EverythingBenefits?
RL: We’ve got a great team, and a great solution and many wonderful clients and channel partners that are standing behind it. And the market conditions could not be better for our continued growth. Our team continues to expand, and we’re working on an awesome new product that will be coming out next year. It is a wonderful and rewarding journey, and we are excited about what the future will bring for EverythingBenefits and our ecosystem.
