Lately, India’s healthcare backers have been coming to terms with a new buzzword: health assurance. Because prevention, as it turns out, is not just better than cure—it’s more investable, too.

Just in May, investors wrote one of the largest seed-round cheques to PB Health, a Gurugram-based healthcare platform backed by insurtech PB Fintech, when it aimedMintPB Healthcare secures $218 million in seed funding from PB Fintech, General Catalyst to take a “preventive-care approach”. But long before it secured $218 million from venture-capital firms like General Catalyst, a startup from Pune had already introduced India to a variant of the same concept.

Loop Health positions itself as a corporate broker, not an insurer. It doesn’t underwrite risk, but sells third-party insurance products to HR heads while bundling its own health perks alongside (think free eye checkups at Dr Agarwal’s and a discount on Cult.fit memberships). The insurers include Niva Bupa, ICICI Lombard, and Star Health, and the mid-sized companies it serves are Ola, Firstcry, and Social, among others.

The idea is simple: if you keep people from getting sick, they won’t need expensive medical treatment. And if they don’t need expensive medical treatment, everyone wins: the insurer pays out less, the employer is happy, and employees won’t have to deal with hospital food.

It’s a model that has helped the seven-year-old company grow quickly.

Loop, valuedEntrackrYC-backed Loop Health set to raise $25 Mn in a new round at around $150 million in 2022, now claims to cover over 1,200 corporate clients and their 850,000 employees, and has raised $40 million from investors like Elevation Capital.

General Catalyst is on Loop’s cap table, too. Which makes sense because the VC firm’s chief executive, Hemant Taneja, is practically evangelicalGeneral CatalystUnHealthcare: A Manifesto for Health Assurance about health assurance. He has even spun outBusiness InsiderGeneral Catalyst's Hemant Taneja is trying to redefine venture capital — and baffling the industry a separate unit that oversees investments in this space.