Healthcare price comparison startup Turquoise Health announced today it has raised $5 million in funding to support product development.

Andreessen Horowitz led the seed round. Other investors included Bessemer Venture Partners and Box Group and individual investors such as Henry Ward, Megan Callahan, Jonathan Bush and Klay Thompson.

Founded in 2020, Turquoise Health aims to simplify health care administration and reduce the complexity of healthcare in the U.S. The company is building software to make pricing clearer, simpler and lower cost in the current “zero-sum game that results in higher prices.”

Turquoise Health pitches itself as tackling a serious problem with U.S. health care: how much it costs. U.S. healthcare is famously the most expensive in the world. Faced with fluctuating billing guidelines and confusing insurance requirements, patients struggle to find the price, let alone that providers have difficulty quoting patients transparent prices.

The company claims that many providers want their patients to know upfront prices but hit too many barriers doing so, and one of the issues is that data infrastructure is broken. That’s where Turquoise Health steps in.

The company engages with well-intentioned providers and payers that want to work together to create price transparency for patients and employers.

Turquoise Health has worked to solve the issue by curating more than 175 million records of never-before-seen hospital rates and releasing products to make this data accessible to all. The company’s Hospital Rates Database puts the data directly into the hands of engineers and analysts, while the Provider Rate Search enables data discovery with predictive search and powerful filters.

Turquoise gives consumers free access through its website to explore hospital pricing and understand medical costs. With the new funding, the company will expand its payer-provider platform to enable do-it-yourself service bundling and direct-to-provider contracting.

“At Turquoise, we’re taking a fresh approach to price transparency for patients by addressing the root causes with provider and payer contracts upstream,” Turquoise Health Chief Executive Officer Chris Severn said in a statement. “We’re working to simplify the transaction process so that patients can understand the total cost upfront.”

Image: Turquoise Health