Kareem Zaki is an Egyptian-American investor, entrepreneur, and licensed healthcare broker. To date, he has co-founded four healthcare-related companies.
Forbes featured Zaki on their 30 Under 30 Venture Capital list in 2018.
In 2019, Zaki co-founded the healthcare brokerage firm Nava. The company specifically aims to help small and mid-sized companies find better healthcare at lower costs. Such companies play a big role in the lives of many Americans.
Kareem Zaki co-founded several Healthcare Start-ups
Zaki currently works at the venture capital firm Thrive, where he joined as a General Partner in 2014. He led Thrive’s investments in the online mortgage broker Morty and the stock trading app Robinhood. Zaki is a board investor at Cedar, Honor, Welkin, and Thrive’s offshoot insurance company Oscar Health, among others.
“We [at Thrive] partner and work closely with companies transforming many major parts of the healthcare system–insurance, homecare, clinical trials, pharmacy, patient care, payments, cybersecurity, cancer, mental health,” Zaki told The Nava Team.
Zaki is co-founder and Board Member of several healthcare technology start-ups. He launched the healthcare financial technology company Cedar in 2016. Cedar, a platform for patient engagement and payments, serves more than 10 million patients. In 2019, Zaki co-founded the benefits brokerage firm Nava and the healthcare security company Scope Security. In 2020 he co-founded the digital hospital service technology company Cadence.
Kareem Zaki left Medical School for Healthcare Investing
“My family is from Egypt, but I’ve lived in the US most of my life,” Zaki recalled. “Growing up, I always thought I would become a doctor. However, as I got close to starting medical school, I realized that healthcare was much more than doctors treating patients. I wanted to better understand how the whole system worked.”
Instead of going to medical school, Zaki decided to become a private equity investor with The Blackstone Group in 2011. He holds a B.A. in Economics and Healthcare Policy from Harvard University.
“I didn’t know if investing was for me, but I was excited to learn more about the companies that drove the structure of our healthcare system,” Zaki continued. “I learned a lot during my time there, but my most formative insight was that the large companies were far from figuring it all out, and that there were lots of opportunities for new companies to really innovate–especially in traditional industries like healthcare.”
Kareem Zaki co-founded Nava
Zaki co-founded Nava with Chief Production Officer Donald DeSantis and Chief Executive Officer Brandon Weber.
“Thrive was fortunate to back Donald and Brandon’s last company, and we knew we wanted to work together again,” Zaki explained. “We went back-and-forth on ideas, with most of them revolving around healthcare. During this process, Brandon tore his ACL.”
“His experience dealing with that medical episode was a frustratingly opaque and confusing process that is, unfortunately, all too common for patients navigating the US healthcare system. The experience helped crystalize and bring to life an opportunity we had been talking about in benefits brokerage, which eventually became Nava.”
Nava’s health care advisor model is made specifically for small and mid-sized companies. The firm looks to how large Fortune 50 companies like Walmart and Amazon manage employee healthcare at lower costs.
Nava draws on the practices, tech, and insights of large companies, who typically hire healthcare system experts. Unlike traditional brokers, Nava offers modern open enrollment, a support team for employee benefits and medical billing, and personalized recommendations.
“The challenge with the employer-sponsored healthcare model is that we require employers to become healthcare experts,” Zaki said. “These decisions usually fall onto a business owner or HR leader or finance executive that has a lot of other responsibilities to manage. As such, it is no surprise that employers are overwhelmed managing their healthcare, and have struggled to get good value on their healthcare spend for decades.”
Nava boasts savings of 8-12% without reducing employee benefits.
Learn more at Nava’s website here.
