Stacy Edgar, Venteur

CEO and Cofounder, Venteur

Growing up, Stacy Edgar and her brother Tim’s family managed more than a million dollars in healthcare costs when their father became sick. The siblings founded Venteur in 2021 to make health insurance more affordable for businesses and the families that work for them.  The Venteur product empowers individuals to maximize tax-exempt employer allowances and find affordable, high-quality health benefits, ensuring healthcare costs don’t become a lifelong burden for families. 

As we look ahead to SF Tech Week (Oct 7-13) and Venteur’s Health X AI dinner at CANOPY Jackson Square on October 10, Stacy shares the potential of Venteur’s AI agents to mimic medical specialists, why she plays videos of hunting orca pods during team meetings, and how leasing a Private Office at CANOPY coworking space has led to multiple collaborations with aligned startups. 

What makes Venteur’s approach unique?

We’re on a mission to make healthcare affordable by disrupting the status quo of health insurance by replacing it with something more consumer-centric. We believe that every person should own the hiring and firing decisions of their health provider and health insurer. Once that happens, you see an incentive shift across the system towards taking care of you, the insured, rather than brokers and intermediaries. 

Building upon the recent regulation introducing the Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement (ICHRA), we can leverage AI to make personalized healthcare possible. You can have a customized health insurance plan to finance personalized healthcare. 

What led you to found Venteur?

I grew up on individual plans because my parents were entrepreneurs. During the first year of my parents’ business, my dad became extremely ill, and doctors said he wouldn’t live to see 40. He’s still here today, thank God, but my family managed over a million dollars of health expenses when I was growing up. 

This family crisis forced a lightbulb to go off. As a family, we realized that health insurance is a financial management tool. When you think of it that way, what looks good and bad regarding your insurance benefits changes. You know you need to pay for specific doctors, no matter what—it’s life or death—but you also need to pay your mortgage and provide for your family. 

Regulation change five years ago enabled Venteur to bring the opportunity of cash plus insurance constructs to the market at a lower price point with a more advantageous offer, empowering employees to become more proactive consumers. We’ve also built different AI tools to help them make the best choice. 

The businesses we serve often save 20 percent or 30 percent of costs. One of our clients saved $9 million on their health insurance, which translates to 170 jobs for which they didn’t have to make a reduction in workforce.

What proprietary AI tools does Venteur use to give employees power over their healthcare?

There are two places where we use AI, although infinite possibilities exist. The first is in our AI-powered decision support technology. We pull from payroll data to forecast what might happen to you regarding your health. There’s a lot of healthcare data out there—if we know your age, gender, and zip code, we already know a lot about you. While we don’t ask customers to complete questionnaires initially, around 60 percent of our members volunteer information related to their health, and we can combine that additional data into the billing code.

We run an instantaneous quote with three plans uniquely recommended for you, driven by our tech—this is Venteur’s personalized health insurance concept. You can use Venteur’s tools to look at all market offerings, but we curate what you see and recommend how you should spend the money your employer allocates to keep you well. Our AI tells you which is the right mix of insurance and cash and identifies the right service providers to help you achieve that goal.

The second element is that we use AI agents to pay premiums and create audits—routine, mundane tasks like insurance paperwork—which allows us to scale operationally and stay extremely lean, reducing costs by 86 percent.

Please give us the elevator pitch for Venteur’s product offering. 

We serve employees, employers, brokers, and insurance companies. ICHRA allows you to pick your health insurance plan using your employer’s monthly tax-free allowance. These funds can be used to cover insurance premiums, including dental and vision, as well as qualified medical expenses. 

Venteur offers access to dozens more options than a standard group plan, and your health plan belongs to you, which means you can keep it if you leave your company. You get to choose from any qualified health plan on the market. Venteur can help you select a plan covering your preferred doctors, providers, and prescriptions. If you choose a health plan that costs less than your employer contribution, the extra funds are added to Venteur’s Health Wallet, an account used to pay for qualified medical expenses.

Venteur offers customizable coverage for you, your spouse, and any number of kids—in any combination. 

What kind of benefits do Venteur customers see compared with opting for their company’s standard plan? 

You get to choose your journey, and we’ll help you every step of the way. Independents often get sticker shock when they have to cover their own healthcare, but most companies pay more, in fact, for comparable coverage for their employees.

For example, Microsoft pays nearly $30,000 per employee annually for a great healthcare plan. With Venteur, you can use your employer’s healthcare allowance to buy the top plan on the individual market for the coverage you need and then have $15,000 in cash left over to pay medical expenses over the year, which is incredibly powerful. From this wallet, you can cover every co-pay, every prescription, and maybe some things you thought were out of reach, like preventive care or wellness. This way, investments in yourself that previously we considered luxuries become healthcare norms.

Why did you make the orca your mascot? 

My co-founder is based in Seattle. Orcas swim the coast from San Francisco to Seattle, so it became a nod to our distributed team. Orcas are also extremely smart, female-led, and an excellent device for talking about teamwork—we often show videos of how orcas collaborate to wash prey off an ice floe as a metaphor for the status quo of healthcare and how we have to be completely in sync to disrupt it. It’s a little bit of fun but also very inspiring. 

What changes, developments, or evolutions are you most excited about in your sector? 

One idea we’re exploring is what happens when AI agents work together. For instance, if you train an agent to become an expert in cardiology and one to become a chiropractic expert and mimic how doctors engage with patients and insurance systems, our hypothesis is that different inputs working together generate more specialized outputs for improved outcomes.

Tying that idea together through workflow automation is fairly complicated, but by mimicking how the medical system works today, with multidisciplinary decision-making across all specialties, we’re exploring how that influences what a model generates and recommends regarding healthcare. 

How does leasing a Private Office at CANOPY Jackson Square help you succeed in your business? 

Our focus is healthcare and AI, and CANOPY’s Jackson Square location, in particular, is uniquely situated in an AI bubble—here, influential people and companies in this space come together. We’ve been fully remote up until recently. As we work in person for the first time with each other, we’re excited to build our community and work in person with our neighbors. 

Why did you decide to host a dinner for AI-based healthcare startup founders at CANOPY during SF Tech Week?

Venteur has only been a CANOPY Member for a few months, but we’ve already met four or five healthcare and AI startups with whom we’re collaborating. We really want to get to know people on a personal level while also exploring genuinely inspiring ideas for the future and what healthcare could look like.

Do you have any advice for other women looking to enter the AI startup space, perhaps as founders in AI-powered healthcare or any other industry?

During conversations with other entrepreneurs, something that often crops up about female founders is that we often feel like we have to have credentials, be ready, or be more—that somehow we ourselves are not enough. Entrepreneurship is about bringing ideas to reality, so obviously, you can’t have all the knowledge before you realize your idea. Being prepared is never bad, but stopping yourself because you need a degree or qualification to turn your idea into reality is potentially harmful. 

You are enough. I say jump in. You probably know more than you think and will surprise yourself with how much you can accomplish.

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You can follow Stacy on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) @stacymei and on Linkedin. Follow Venteur on Instagram, X, and TikTok @venteurhealth, and on Linkedin.

What’s your vision for next-gen healthcare? If you’ve raised capital for your AI-power healthcare startup and want to bring your ideas to the table, request to join Venteur’s October 10 AI X Healthcare Dinner at CANOPY Jackson Square here. Stacy would love to collaborate!