How Did Oscar Health Recover From a 95 Percent Drop?

Oscar Health, the first company Thrive ever invested in, fell 95% from its peak value in December 22. It then climbed back above its IPO price. Nworah Ayogu said Oscar increased 100% year over year, while health insurers as a group had a hard last year and a half.

Nworah Ayogu remembered arguing as a know-it-all med student that a new health insurer was a bad idea. The last health insurer created was United Healthcare in 1977, before the internet. A new insurer was not something people did, because it is too hard and takes too much scale and too much capital. He was glad to be proven wrong. Oscar's plan was to use the ACA to build a consumer-centric health insurer, and the plan worked. Oscar built a tech-first infrastructure a decade ago, including its own claim stack and its own claims processing.

The infrastructure from a decade ago is what has let Oscar move fast with AI, because Oscar already had a modern tech stack.