Trusty.care

Joseph Schneier is a serial entrepreneur who with his co-founder, founded and exited two companies in the educational technology space. Following that, Mr. Schneier worked with behavioral research scientists at NYU building technology-based solutions for patient behavioral change with a focus on drug adherence, health literacy and addiction. In 2013, he co-founded Cognotion--a company focused on solving the talent shortage of healthcare workers.In 2018, Mr. Schneier founded Trusty.care, an insurtech company for the retiree population. Mr. Schneier has spoken at TedMed, Lake Nona, JP Morgan Healthcare and is a mentor at New York University, Wharton, Cornell, Columbia, and the City University of New York college system. Mr. Schneier sits on the board of Superbia Credit Union, a LGBTQ credit union,  and the advisory board of Stonewall Community Development Corporation, a non-profit focused on LGBTQ senior housing.

My life's mission has been about creating sustainable businesses that address some of the core challenges we are facing in society. At Trusty.care we are solving two core problems: 1. How do we reduce the risk of older adults going through bankruptcy because of out of pocket healthcare costs 2. How do we empower the millions of professionals that surround older adults to reimagine their jobs to provide clear guidance for older adults. At Trusty, our platform connects professionals to the data they need to guide older adults in understanding public benefits, insurance and health savings.  By doing this we are keeping hundreds of thousands of working class Americans in their jobs and providing financial security to tens of millions of older adults. We believe that these are the kind of models of business that can transform our country. 

Older adults are the fastest growing demographic, both here in America and worldwide.  In America, 25% of them can't afford the medications they are prescribed. 85% are at risk of not being able to afford their healthcare costs as they age.  This problem, while more extreme in the US, is by no means an isolated issue.  Older adults around the world are struggling to understand how to afford retirement and long-term care. The demographics of the world are changing and we have not prepared as a society for these shifts.  Surrounding older adults are millions of professionals that uniquely positioned to help older adults to understand what benefits are available to them, how to access those benefits, and where they may have gaps in coverage.  Unfortunately, not only in the US, but all around the world there is a real lack of clarity in projecting costs and understanding how to knit together all of the data on services and benefits to provide clear answers on what an older adult and their family should do to maintain financial security and access to care. 

Trusty.care is a web application that is AI driven that takes in health information on an individual and uses our patent-pending machine learning models to match that individual to the available benefits, insurance products and cost-savings tools that will be fit the needs of that individual.  The platform is designed to empower a professional to provide essentially the HR function for retirees who no longer have a person that they can turn to that is looking at the full picture of their benefits and needs.  We launched the product in the US but have been approached by governments of Japan, China, Mexico and various countries in the Middle East to see if we can use the same model of benefits administration for older adults in their countries. We believe that this approach is scalable and could impact the lives of millions of people all over the world. 

Our product is serving two core constituencies: 

Older adults (50+): Our platform provides measurable improvements in the financial stability of older adult communities by matching them to the benefits and insurance products they are eligible for. Each individual saves an average of $700 with their first interaction with our system. The secondary outcome we measure is improved adherence and access to preventative care. By improving affordability we are able to show increases in care and this brings the overall cost of care down for the older adult. 

High school educated populations: The second population we serve are professionals, like insurance brokers, health navigators, and financial advisors that get certified to be able to provide this guidance. We believe we can improve their likelihood of maintaining value in the market and employability as a result and it is part of our mission to help them to navigate into what the future of work will look like for the insurance industry. 

Traditionally as a society we have overlooked the needs of older adults, but in America for the first time in history there are more older adults than children. By improving their financial stability we improve not only their lives, but their children who no longer are needing to step in to cover their parent's financial needs and potentially increasing the likelihood of intergenerational wealth transfer. Through improved data sharing we can empower vulnerable populations to get the care they deserve, at a price they can afford. 

Four years ago my younger brother was in a car accident and he didn't have health insurance.  As he was sitting in the ICU, my family was spending their time trying to figure out how we were going to afford his care. The stress that families undergo trying to navigate systems is one that I felt like was a problem worth solving. I had spent the last 5 years working on talent shortages in nursing homes and I knew this problem was even worse for older adults and so two years ago, my co-founder and I set out on a journey to discover how we could solve this crisis. We brought alongside us public health experts, insurance experts, we joined up with Medicare.gov's Blue Button program and partnered with the National Council on Aging. We spent 18 months just following the thread of understanding how money flows in healthcare and how to get people the right information. We are now poised to accelerate our growth with our platform to change healthcare and insurance for good. 

When we started Trusty.care, we knew that the problem existed of financial insecurity among older adults but as we dug into it, the thing that really got us going was realizing two things:

1. Most of the financial insecurity because of healthcare costs was solvable and people simply did not have the right information at the right time. That is heartbreaking that lower middle class and middle class families are not getting care or going deep into debt unnecessarily, because of lack of information. 

2. I have spent my life dedicated to improving employability of people without a college degree. My first job was interviewing women in prison that had been trafficked into Israel and I vowed as I sat across the table from them that I would dedicate my life to improving job outcomes so that people wouldn't have to make choices that led them to being in that position of vulnerability. The idea that we can both improve the lives of older adults and get middle class Americans into a more sustainable job at the same time, well that is what gets me up in the morning. 

I have spent the last 20 years building startups that address society's most complex challenges including spending the last 12 years in the digital health and insurance sector specifically focused on older adult populations.  The team around me includes people that ran some of the largest insurance companies, held positions at CMS, ran advocacy groups for older adults and the team building the product are experts in AI and data science. We have assembled a world-class team that is passionate about connecting the dots in healthcare and insurance to deliver on our promise to serve both older adults and the professionals that work with them. 

At the start of Covid-19, we face a major setback as a company. We had secured some funding, but prior to the funds coming in our funders backed out because they themselves had lost the majority of their wealth.  It was a gut-wrenching time and so I sat down and wrote my investors a letter and told them that they had invested in a transgender man that left orthodox Judaism, served in the military and lived for my teen years in post-Soviet Russia. I have overcome much harder things than what we were facing and so I made some painful decisions including asking everyone, myself included, to take major pay cuts and set in place a process to push hard on getting in new funding. Asking my team to bear the risk was one of the hardest things I have done but we gave them all stakes in the company and no one left.  Within 6 weeks, I managed to find new investors that were able to fund the company quickly and we were able to do that with the entire team. 

Seven years ago, prior to coming out as trans, I was speaking candidly to an investor in a previous company. I told him about how I was struggling with the loneliness of running your own company. He stopped me and he said, "Jo, don't ever talk to investors about weakness and not about mental health challenges. No one will ever invest in you." I made myself a promise to completely ignore that and to be willing to have open dialogue with entrepreneurs I mentor. Two years later I had the opportunity to speak right before Joe Biden about the challenges of coming out and how addressing my identity allowed me to step into become a real leader because I was operating from a place of strength and not secrecy.  I believe passionately in opening up dialogue for entrepreneurs to be able to own their identities and see that as power and not weakness. 

We are disrupting the narrative that what we need to do is to dismantle the system and instead are saying how can we use the benefits out there to transform people's lives? How can we use the millions of honest workers that are positioned to help to be part of the change of reaching older adults? We also believe that data is the way to do this, but not by creating new data silos but by democratizing data and using new models to work with that data.  We are not interested in replicating the fissions in healthcare, we want to improve access to data that is meaningful to the end consumer and to the professional that works with them. 

Our system leverages two things that increase the long-term impact on society:

1. We collect claims and health data on consumers that use our system. The result of this growing setting of data is that we are building models that are the most accurate we are aware on pricing and access to care. The more users in our system, the smarter and more impactful the system becomes. As our data grows, we will be able to recommend more and more services and benefits that will help older adults achieve financial stability. 

2. By leveraging experts, we significantly reduce our cost of consumer acquisition. 

These two systems self-perpetuate, we increase value of the expert and value to the consumer in a self-sustaining way. Any products we add into this relationship are designed to keep that flywheel going. To date, we have been able to bring this value to thousands of customers, been evaluated by Medicare.gov, and have partnered with the National Council on Aging and various other research institutes to show the value to the consumer. 

We currently serve 20K beneficiaries, but this year we will serve 1m beneficiaries with our partner organizations. Over the course of the next five years we will be serving 20m beneficiaries. 

We would like to fully integrate with at least 5 countries' health systems to help older adults around the world to age with dignity and financial stability. It is our mission to transform the way people retire through measurable, scalable solutions that help people make the key decisions they need to make to age well. 

The biggest challenges we face currently are access to quality data sets and we participate in lobbying the government to require greater data transparency in the US health system. It is a critical element to our success. As we expand into other markets, we will need to make sure we are measuring what success looks like in those countries and that we don't underestimate the challenges in data aggregation in other health systems. 

We are overcoming this barrier by participating in steering committees that are influencing policy around health data and pricing data. We must require our institutions to be transparent through the entire industry. 

AARP Foundation, National Council on Aging, Carin Alliance, Medicare Blue Button 2.0

We charge on a per/professional SaaS model.  Our customers purchase our product because we allow them to provide greater value to consumers, to more easily manage their business, and to speed up their time to sale.  They are worried about their perception in the market so this allows them to improve that perception by providing concrete, tangible assistance. 

We currently have raised capital to reach the point we are at today ($3.5M). We will continue to raise capital to grow the company but are also looking at grants to pursue some of the research into how to use the data we collect to provide better direction to older adults. 

In addition, we are revenue generating. Our product is in the market with paying customers. 

We have raised $3.5M in equity financing from family offices, VCs and angel investors.

We sell to health insurance brokers, financial advisors, credit unions and annuities companies on a per seat model. We began generating revenue last month and will be at $20K MRR by the end of this month. By September we will be at $100K MRR. 

We are raising a $1.5M convertible note round. We have $1M of that raised and $500K remaining. That is going towards marketing and product development. The terms are a $7.9M cap/20% discount. 

$1.2M (monthly burn is currently $90K)

There are not a lot of trans men running tech companies with a core social impact goal.  My goal with the Elevate Prize would be to both use the capital to go deep in understanding what additional resources can we bring to the table to improve the lives of older adults globally and to highlight that founders come from diverse backgrounds and to raise visibility on behalf of the trans community that we can operate in places of leadership and have a place at the table. 

The second thing we will use this for is continuing our push for greater transparency in insurance and healthcare costs in America. We think that is the key to truly transformational change and we want to be at the forefront of making that happen and it requires time and attention. This prize will help us to do that. 

We would love assistance on highlighting the needs of older adults and elevating that conversation. We think more people need to be discussing this really overlooked conversation. 

I am a firm believer in mentorship and coaching and am always looking for more help in growing my leadership skills. 

USAA, VA, SEIU

We want to expand our offering to union members and to members of the military and we would love to work with the organizations above to serve their member base.