Working at Assured Allies: the Leading Insurtech Company for Evidence-Based Successful Aging Innovation

Keith Cline, VentureFizz

Andy, thanks so much for joining us.

Andy Freedman, Assured Allies

Thanks for having me, Keith. Good to see you again.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you because we're gonna talk about Assured Allies, which is unlocking the benefits of healthy aging. So let's unpack what that means what is Assured Allies and what you guys do.

Andy Freedman, Assured Allies

So when we started the company over six years ago, we had a mission to make the experience of aging better for people like our parents and our grandparents and ourselves. And when we started to dig into the market to see what problems were out there, one thing that came to the top was the reality that 95% of people want to stay at home as they age. But that's not always possible. Over 70% of us will need some kind of long term care, support as we age, whether it be having someone come into your home, or living in a facility. But only 7% of us have the insurance product that would help make that happen. It's a misconception that there will be a financial safety net out there to pay for long term care should we need it. But the reality is that most of us don't have the support we need. And that was a problem that we really wanted to correct and what we've been working to solve over the last six years and excited to share some more about our products today.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz 

Now there's a lot here, there are different parties involved. So how does it all work? 

Andy Freedman, Assured Allies

Yeah, great question. So when we started looking to the market, there's, you know, a lot of things happening in the healthcare space, right, people are seeing their health care providers getting support, Medicare, Medicare Advantage. But when we looked at the financial side, that's where we really saw the opportunity. And we ended up stumbling into this industry of long term care insurance, which is a financial product that is available, where a consumer can buy a product to help pay for things like nursing homes, and assisted living facilities and private duty home care. And the reality of that industry is that was products that were very popular in the 90s and early 2000s. But because of financial miscalculations, and those initial products, started to not be sold as widely, companies started to go bankrupt and harder to get. Currently, the ability to buy those products is really challenging. They have about a 50% rejection rate. And what that means is that people, the market of older adults, people turning 65, over 10,000 Every day, are lacking the solution that's going to pay for care or support if they need it. So we saw that as an opportunity. Could we revitalize that market? Can we help create new products that make that a viable product? And then we also saw an opportunity where all these people who own long term care policies, they didn't want to actually go live in a nursing home? COVID only exemplified the reasons why not. But they were sometimes struggling with well, what can I do to maintain my independence. So right now we work in two ways. We work with long term care insurance companies to provide a program to their policyholders free of cost to the policyholder, and that's called our age assured program that's been around about three years. And in the last year, we introduced a new product to the market called Never stop, which was meant to create new long term care insurance products to the market, new ways that consumers a little bit younger people in their 60s, early 70s, could figure out how to create more of a financial safety net. And that also comes with a wellness component to it. So two very exciting products, different audiences. On the consumer side, I think one of the early observations of the company was that society really doesn't do a good job at communicating with older adults, we kind of have this view that once you're old, you're old, and we communicate to you this in a similar way. But people are very different. You know, just like, I think about my parents who are in their early 70s. And then I think about my grandmother who will be celebrating her 99th birthday next week. Their needs their lifestyle, completely different, even though they both happen to be over 65. So we're really looking to unpack that and create new solutions based on who and how someone wants to live.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz 

Now Assured Allies recently announced funding earlier this year. So what's the latest with the company?

Andy Freedman, Assured Allies 

Yeah, so the company has grown a lot since we started back in 2017. We're currently about 100 employees split between our two main headquarters, our US headquarters, which is focused here in the Boston area, but we have employees across the country. And then in Israel, where we have our Israeli headquarters in Tel Aviv. The teams are about equal in size, about 50 in each office, with most of our research and developments, our data science teams, our clinical research teams, our front end and back end developers sitting in Israel, as well. And then on the US side, that's where most of our commercial operational teams sit. So sales and marketing, all the operations team, those case managers I mentioned, primarily in the US.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz 

And what's the culture like work at Assured Allies? What's like the day to day like?

Andy Freedman, Assured Allies 

Yeah, I think we're a mission driven company. Right. As I've said in the beginning, our focus is to help older adults successful age at home, and that's something that affects most A team, we all have older adults in our own life that we either are very involved in their care, or will be very involved in their care. And so a lot of the motivation of why people join the company is to help fulfill the mission. I think that translates to the way we work together. We're a caring community. I think what we're experiencing right now, with everything going on in the world, specifically in Israel, is causing us as a team to really come together and support one another. These are challenging times. And I've been really overwhelmed to see the response from from all of our employees, both in Israel are going through extremely emotional, traumatic experiences in our team in Israel, who's stepping up to be there and support however we can. Seeing that kind of in practice, right, it's one thing to have a value of caring for one another. It's a whole nother thing to live it in the day to day. And I think I've been really impressed with how a team that was ultimately built during a pandemic, right hasn't had a whole lot of live face to face interaction, truly care for one another. I think that's that's one side of the culture. I think the other side of the culture is that we have taken a very well we call multidisciplinary approach to building the company. There's rarely a meeting that I'm in that doesn't involve at least four of the following kind of personas like a data scientist or a social worker, or a physician, or an actuary, or a marketer, kind of coming together to tackle really complicated problems of how to educate policyholders or consumers about changing the behavior in their life to be safer at home. How do we look into the data and figure out what is working and what's not? And what are we learning? This is this is complicated stuff. And so I think that's the other element is that we all really trust each other and our own unique perspectives. And that leads to some really interesting conversations. Some concepts that are way above my head, that I spent a lot of time trying to learn. But it's been it's been the most fulfilling kind of professional kind of decision of my life to join this company and just reflect on what I've learned.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz

So for your your hiring, like why should Assured Allies be on the radar for job seekers?

Andy Freedman, Assured Allies

Yeah, my personal pitch on why Assured Allies is I think, a lot of companies claim to have mission and many do. Our mission is specific to helping create a better life for our parents and our grandparents and ultimately, ourselves. And I think that's, that's one of the reasons that often people kind of reach out and express interest in the company. I think we're at the right stage. As you mentioned, we recently did close a series B funding round. So we're in a very fortunate position that we have some security financially. But we also have extremely high expectations for ourselves. So I think we're a place where people can be challenged, they can take ownership. We're not a company that has figured it all out. And it's about optimizing. It's about building. And so I think that's another thing that we've seen people coming from large and small companies that are looking to deliver against a mission and really want to own something and create something new. I think we're a good place to get the mix of those things.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Well, if you are interested exploring opportunities that Assured Allies, you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their listings there, go to venturefizz.com/assured-allies, and you'll see all their jobs. Andy, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the details on the company.

Andy Freedman, Assured Allies 

Thank you, Keith.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai