Yash Gupta is the Co-Founder and CTO at Nova Benefits. Founded in 2020, Nova helps Indian companies make workplaces happier and healthier by pairing group health insurance with preventive care, annual health checkups, teleconsultations, mental health counseling, fitness challenges, discounted gym memberships, and a modern, transparent claims experience. We explore why mental health benefits often see under 3% utilization and how better awareness, access, and product design can change that.
In this episode, we delve into the evolution of employee wellness in the post-COVID, hybrid era.
- Nova Benefits focuses on moving beyond hospital-only insurance to preventive health, mental wellness, and everyday engagement.
- Mental health utilization is under 3% despite ~30% needing it, with HR playing a key role in improving awareness and access.
- Evaluating group health insurance involves checking sum insured, covered members, and co-pay or deductible terms.
- Improves claims experience through digitized workflows, real-time tracking, and HRIS integrations.
Yash also shares his path from Udaipur to IIT Delhi and Samsung Korea, co-founding Nova Benefits with Saransh Jain, and the philosophy of building a full?stack, problem-first engineering culture that adopts GenAI where it truly improves outcomes. If you lead People/HR or run a company in India, this conversation is a practical playbook for boosting benefits utilization, improving claims, and building a healthier, happier workplace.
Listen On
Episode Timestamps
- 00:21 Mission of Nova Benefits
- 02:25 Evolution of Work Culture
- 05:34 Services offered from Nova Benefits
- 09:18 Things that an Employee must know
- 11:22 Start of Nova Benefits
- 12:00 Ideal Customer of Nova Benefits
- 13:08 10 Year Mission of Nova Benefits
- 13:47 Tech that powers Nova Benefits
- 18:21 Do Employees also get Nova Benefits
- 19:51 Licensing and Regulations
- 20:57 The Journey of Yash Gupta
- 27:05 Go to Market Journey
- 29:19 Friends and Family Reaction
- 30:30 Work-life Balance
- 33:39 Things you wish you knew sooner
- 40:28 Open Opportunities in the Industry
- 45:57 Engineering Culture at Nova Benefits
- 48:10 Approach towards LLM
- 51:16 Philosophy of Every Engineer being Full Stack
- 53:35 How did you narrow down on the Problem
- 01:04:06 What’s Next for Nova Benefits
- 01:06:28 Pricing Ranges
- 01:10:54 Reaching out to Nova Benefits
About Yash Gupta
Yash is the Co-Founder & CTO @ Nova Benefits. Founded in 2020, Nova Benefits helps companies get the best-in-class group health insurance plans and wellness benefits for their employees.
Full Transcript
Yash Gupta:
One interesting stat on mental health: when we entered that space as a benefit, we saw typical utilization is less than 3 percent. In a thousand-employee company, maybe only about 20 people are actually talking to a therapist or using that benefit.
Aditya Anand:
Can you start by telling us about the mission of Nova Benefits?
Yash Gupta:
When we started Nova Benefits, we were looking at the market and thought health insurance was an interesting space, right after COVID in March or April 2020. That is how we entered it. Over time, we realized how meaningful and impactful this area could be.
Our mission is to make workplaces happier and healthier. To be happy at work, you need three basics in place: how well you are paid, how meaningful your work is, and your physical and mental health. We believe the first two are better left to the company itself, but health is where we want to be the experts and help HR teams make a real impact.
We start with insurance, which is the most common benefit that almost all companies in India offer now. But we go beyond that, because insurance comes into the picture when you are in a hospital, which is rarely a happy time, except for something like maternity. We work to make even those moments smoother, with claims handled well. Everything before that matters too: preventive care like health checkups, teleconsultations, talking to mental health counselors, fitness challenges, and gym memberships. These are the things we focus on in addition to core insurance, and that is what Nova is today.
Aditya Anand:
One thing you said stands out: making workplaces healthier and happier. That is top of mind in the industry today, with all the talk about work culture and work-life balance. Over the past five years, you must have worked with many companies. How have you seen work culture evolve in your customer segment and in the ecosystem at large?
Yash Gupta:
When we started in 2020, being a startup, we worked mostly with SMBs. Remote work was the norm because of lockdowns. Earlier, many processes centered around the office. If a claim was stuck, someone sat in your office and you went to talk to them. Suddenly, you needed systems people were used to in consumer apps. Remote work changed even basic things like health insurance delivery.
Mental health became a big focus, with people losing loved ones or going through COVID themselves. HR teams needed help on how to support their people. There were vaccination camps and COVID-related initiatives early on. After the second wave, things shifted to more hybrid environments, with some in-person sessions and engagement. Health checkups started happening as on-site camps, where someone would collect blood samples for everyone, which turns it into an event with its own benefits compared to at-home checkups.
Now COVID is behind us, and people are focusing more on things like gratitude and building appreciation cultures. We are building there too: how to help people utilize benefits more. One interesting stat on mental health: typical utilization is less than 3 percent. In a thousand-employee company, maybe only 20 people actually talk to a therapist, whereas around 30 percent could benefit. Increasing awareness and helping HR teams drive utilization is a big focus for us.
Aditya Anand:
Let’s step back to where Nova Benefits enters the picture. Can you share more details about the specific services or products you offer to customers?
Yash Gupta:
Insurance is the base of our pyramid. We help HR teams decide what benefits to offer their teams and benchmark against their industry: sum insured amounts, whether to cover parents, and so on. Then we ensure delivery of a great experience after the policy is bought: smooth claims, minimal manual work for HR, and replacing Excel and email chaos with proper systems.
For employees, we make the claims experience much better, with tracking and transparency instead of a black box where you submit and wait 15 to 60 days without updates. Beyond insurance, we move along a spectrum from active care to preventive care. Annual health checkups are our second biggest offering. Only a small percentage of people use insurance in a year, but as a company you want everyone to feel cared for. Checkups are powerful, because many of us have undiagnosed chronic conditions like hypertension, prediabetes, obesity, chronic pain, or deficiencies like vitamin D. You do not need a bad event to do a checkup. We have seen companies with 95 percent participation, where people discover issues early and make lifestyle changes.
We also support mental health, offering counseling programs so employees can speak one-on-one with a therapist. Counseling can cost around 1,500 rupees an hour, and the people who need it most often struggle to take the first step and to pay. Companies have an important role when employees face burnout, stress, sleep disorders, or personal struggles. We can go into more detail there. On the fitness side, we offer discounted gym memberships and similar benefits. This covers the full spectrum of what we do.
Aditya Anand:
In general, we are all sitting on this big thing we do not really know the details of, and when something goes wrong we ask, what do I do now? For someone who is an employee in an organization that provides employee insurance, what should they find out or be aware of ahead of time?
Yash Gupta:
A few basics:
– Sum insured, because that is the limit the insurance will pay. Is it 3 lakhs, 5 lakhs, 10 lakhs?
– Who is covered: just the employee, or also spouse and children, and potentially parents. Covering family can have a big impact on financial and mental health.
– Co-pay or deductible: understand if there is any co-pay or deductible on your policy. There are other details and add-ons, but these top three cover most needs.
Aditya Anand:
When did you guys get started with Nova Benefits?
Yash Gupta:
In 2020, just after COVID began. Earlier, my cofounder Saransh and I were exploring other ideas. We were interested in fintech and health care, and realized health insurance sits at that intersection. COVID made it clear health was everyone’s priority, including ours, so we got into this space around March or April 2020.
Aditya Anand:
With the breadth of offerings Nova Benefits has today, who would you say is your ideal customer?
Yash Gupta:
Any people-first organization in India that wants to care for employees, ensure smooth claim experiences, and help people feel taken care of. Often you skip a health checkup unless someone pushes you, and when you do it, you might find something early and avoid a bigger issue later. Our ideal customer values these outcomes in addition to insurance. They range from companies with 10 employees, where founders insist on insurance, to companies with 5,000 to 10,000 employees and more.
Aditya Anand:
What would you say is the ten-year mission for Nova Benefits?
Yash Gupta:
To truly make workplaces happier and healthier. I tell my team, we should be able to say confidently: sign up with Nova, and after a year you will see measurable improvements in physical and mental health and overall happiness. For most customers, we want to predictably deliver those outcomes within a year.
Aditya Anand:
As cofounder and CTO, you have a lot to build. Tell us about the tech that powers this whole experience.
Yash Gupta:
There are multiple layers. Initially, it was about bringing an offline, paper-driven process online: defining what a claim means, what a policy means, what is covered and not covered, and explaining it clearly to employees. We built ways to submit and track claims through our application.
On the backend, we deal with over 30 insurers in India, each with their own processes and terminology. Harmonizing that was a big early effort. Then we focused on automating HR workflows, integrating with HRMS providers and places employees work, such as Slack, Google Workspace, and Office 365, so HR is not juggling Excel and email. Insurance adds complexity because you also need accurate family details. Spelling mistakes or date errors matter, so we built systems to manage that.
More recently, we have focused on preventive care. We integrated health checkups into the insurance experience, digitized results, and highlight key takeaways: what is red, amber, and green for you. We integrated with mental health providers and even added benefits like pet care where relevant. We have over 100 benefits that we can tailor per customer.
With GenAI, we have made insurance more seamless: extracting data from messy claim documents, categorizing them, auto-filling claim forms, and integrating with insurers so claims flow without a human in the loop. We also built MagicBot, which answers policy coverage questions. People ask, is LASIK covered, or will a fracture treatment be paid by company insurance? We built chat-based tools for that and also features to drive fitness, such as stepathons. On recognition, we built a simple bot to send gratitude cards to teammates, creating a culture of appreciation.
Aditya Anand:
As a customer of Nova Benefits, managers on the customer side get a portal to manage employee wellness and insurance throughout the organization. Do employees also get access to something?
Yash Gupta:
Employees interact with everything: insurance, health checkups, mental health assessments and counseling, and fitness challenges. The key value for the company is a 360-degree view of all benefits with correlated data. Traditionally, companies had separate vendors for mental health, insurance, and health checkups, sometimes multiple checkup vendors across cities, such as Apollo in Delhi and Tata 1mg in Mumbai. We combine that data, cross-correlate it, and surface insights.
For example, teams receiving fewer kudos on the gratitude board might, a quarter later, show lower motivation or a feeling that their work is not appreciated. You can diagnose issues sooner and act. We are building integrated dashboards for leaders to take action.
Aditya Anand:
In this space, does a startup need to follow any licensing regulations?
Yash Gupta:
Definitely. We deal with sensitive health and company data. On the insurance side, you need a license from the insurance regulator IRDAI in India. We are an IRDAI-regulated insurance broker. We have ISO and SOC 2 certifications, and we are pursuing GDPR and DPDP-related certifications focused on data privacy. Data is central to what we do, and we invest in keeping it safe.
Aditya Anand:
Let’s switch gears. Tell us about your journey, maybe starting with childhood or adolescence. What were your early formative years like?
Yash Gupta:
I am from Udaipur, a beautiful city in Rajasthan. My extended family largely runs trading or manufacturing businesses, so entrepreneurship was what I saw growing up. In 6th or 7th grade, I got into coding through a basic programming book. Around the same time, dial-up internet became common. I learned how to build websites and make some money online through forums and platforms like Fiverr, and I started freelancing. Over time, the projects got bigger.
In 11th and 12th, I prepared for competitive exams and got into IIT Delhi in computer science. Seniors had lots of ideas, which exposed me to building applications and tools for them. That showed me there is more than freelancing: you can build your own product and scale it into a business. In second year, we tried a more serious startup around a college and school alumni platform for mentoring, internships, and jobs. We were naive. We built something but did not yet understand product management, adoption, or business. The big learning was that you cannot focus only on tech. You have to understand customers and problems deeply.
I decided to get more experience, read, and learn. I took a job at Samsung in South Korea, which gave me time to meet people and read. After almost three years, I quit to start up. That was always the plan. I met my cofounder Saransh about six months before I quit. We did a cofounder dating process: side projects, many conversations about values, why we are starting up, interests, and passions. Then we decided to start together.
Aditya Anand:
That is when I realized how similar your and my journeys have been. I can draw so many parallels. I relate to so much of it, but continue.
Yash Gupta:
Back then, in February 2020, I was still working at Samsung. I came to India for a week so we could work together as a final step in our cofounder journey. We were at the Accel Launchpad in Koramangala, and we hit it off. We got more done in seven days than in the previous month. We realized we are both driven, work at the same frequency, care about the same things, and bring complementary strengths. Saransh is great at sales and outreach, and I am comfortable building software. Bring us a problem that does not need years of R and D, and we will solve it. That has been our approach since: pick a problem, solve it, and find customers who face it.
Aditya Anand:
I want to go back to what you said earlier: anyone can build tech these days. I believe tech is no longer the differentiator. It is about positioning and solving real user journeys and outcomes. Tell us about your go-to-market journey. How did you start selling to your initial customers?
Yash Gupta:
Credit to Saransh here. He was clear that you sell first, then build. We had our first customer before writing a single line of code. We made a landing page and pitched that we could help find health insurance for your company. We even ran an experiment on retail insurance for individuals alongside corporate. After we closed the first customer, we built the platform to solve their problems.
We continuously identify customer pain points and build for them, rather than building first and hoping it solves something. GTM-wise, we started with venture-funded companies because that was our network. Saransh had a background in venture capital from working at Accel. Over time, we spun up marketing and outbound sales, which now drive most of our business.
Aditya Anand:
Starting up, how did your friends and family react?
Yash Gupta:
It was easier for me because my family is business-focused. It was harder to convince them to take a job in South Korea than to start a business in India. They were happy and supportive when I came back to start up. Friends were supportive too. Many people want to start up eventually, and I see many juniors and peers starting now. India’s ecosystem pushes you to start and people help each other a lot.
Aditya Anand:
How do you personally manage work-life balance? It is particularly relevant for you and everyone at Nova Benefits, as you are building a large company while enabling wellness for your customers’ organizations.
Yash Gupta:
As a founder, there are fires and opportunities everywhere, and you feel like doing everything. You have to decide what to say no to and let some fires burn so you can focus on the few that matter.
A key lesson is to rely on your people. Early on, as a techie, I wanted to fix everything myself. Eventually, you become the bottleneck. You must invest in people, delegate effectively, and train them so they can own areas. Spend a week or a month enabling someone, and they free you up for a year or more. We have great people at Nova I can rely on, which lets me, for example, spend a Saturday on this conversation without worrying about production issues or customer blockers.
Also, be a living example: focus on physical and mental health. I see a clear difference on days I work out. Even a 5 km run or a weights session gives a mental and physical boost. If you want to perform consistently, physical health has to be there.
Aditya Anand:
Every day that you work out is already a success.
Yash Gupta:
Exactly. Even if nothing else works out, at least you have your workout done.
Aditya Anand:
I want to dive into the journey of learning. Founders inevitably become experts in their domain. How has your journey been learning about the insurance industry, employee wellness, work culture, and work-life balance? What do you know now that you did not at the start?
Yash Gupta:
A lot. We knew nothing about insurance before starting Nova. We learned from first principles: what insurance really is. In most purchases, you pay money and get a product. In insurance, you pay money to transfer risk. If you want to avoid the risk of a big hospital bill for your family, you pay a premium to transfer that risk.
We learned how crucial terms and conditions are: what is covered, what is not, and which things matter most. We learned underwriting and how insurers think about good and bad risk. In B2B, premiums are not fixed. If your group’s claims last year were high, this year’s premium rises. In retail, you get a no-claim bonus if you do not claim. In B2B, you can design bespoke coverage as you want, but premiums are decided by experience, so you must strike a balance between cost and benefits.
On wellness, the biggest learning is awareness and utilization. Initially, we thought we needed ever deeper programs. But if people do not know about the benefits, it does not help. First, ensure the base program is solid. Then focus on awareness and usage. Many vendors list 50 benefits but do not want utilization because it costs money. A year later, 90 percent of employees do not even know they had checkups or mental health support. Changing that has been our journey.
Getting from 0 to 70 percent usage is feasible with good communication. Beyond that, it needs intense follow-up, because people are busy. That is where impact matters most, because the busiest people may need checkups most. We also learned to break problems down: do not look only at an overall 60 percent checkup rate. Slice by team. Maybe sales is at 90 percent and engineering at 40 percent. Enable HR to work with managers so messages land. Our tech focuses on making these insights actionable for HR.
Aditya Anand:
I imagine you work very closely with HR teams.
Yash Gupta:
Yes. That is our primary stakeholder. We help HR teams win by making it easier to help people thrive, and we help them do it in an easier way.
Aditya Anand:
It is a massive space, and there is a lot yet to be solved. What are some open opportunities for an entrepreneur looking to start something here?
Yash Gupta:
In employee benefits and wellness, there are many opportunities. You can go deep into culture building, gratitude, fitness, and community. A big challenge is building communities inside companies so people take care of each other, not just leadership or HR supporting people.
On the insurance side, there are opportunities too.
Aditya Anand:
Let’s get into the insurance side as well. What is open there?
Yash Gupta:
One area I am intrigued by is data privacy and cyber risk. The DPDP Act, India’s Digital Personal Data Protection law, will be enforced this year. Data privacy is becoming a priority. We have all seen breaches leading to spam calls and even scams. Now there are penalties attached. As a company, you must ensure data is safe.
Even if you implement best practices, there is residual risk: a typo, an unhappy employee going rogue, an engineer accidentally publishing a private key, or an intern making a mistake. That is where cyber insurance comes in. It has existed for a while but was on the sidelines. With DPDP, it is becoming important. We are exploring it for ourselves and for our customers.
It ties back to employee wellness in an interesting way: 91 percent of attacks start as phishing attempts on someone in the company. You can have all the tooling, but a human mistake often triggers the risk. Your team must be at the center of security. They need awareness and a culture of security. It is early for us, but there is a lot of opportunity to marry these themes and help companies deal with them.
Aditya Anand:
I want to know more about the team at Nova Benefits. Tell us about the engineering culture and how the team has evolved.
Yash Gupta:
This is close to my heart. At Nova, everyone is a full stack engineer in the broad sense: generalists comfortable across the stack. We are a small team of around 16 to 17 engineers. Nothing is off-limits. No one says, I do not do DevOps, so I cannot touch AWS, or I do not do AI, so I cannot build a POC with OpenAI APIs. We have a distributed skill set. Not everyone does everything, but some are leaning into AI and reading research papers, some into data science with warehouses and pipelines, some into cybersecurity, and some into HCI and front-end craft. One of our engineers even pursued a master’s in HCI. Avoiding rigid labels has helped us a lot.
Aditya Anand:
Can you share more about your initial journey adopting GenAI or your approach to LLMs? Everyone is trying to figure out how it applies to their industry.
Yash Gupta:
The industry is moving fast, with something new every week. When GPT-3 arrived, there was a step change in response quality. It almost felt like AGI at times, though we now know its strengths and limits. Since then, RLHF, better prompting, and techniques like RAG have matured. Multimodal models brought vision, text, and even audio/video together, enabling document and conversational intelligence at scale.
RAG has been extremely useful for us. We sit on a lot of unstructured policy data and coverage details. Now we can answer questions like, I have a fracture and need a plaster cast; is it covered? Earlier, that was unimaginable at scale without rule engines, especially with hundreds of customers and different policies. Now we can represent the data and query against it. We still have to tune carefully to avoid hallucinations. If a document is ambiguous, the AI must not fabricate a definitive answer. We are still learning and improving there.
Aditya Anand:
Tell me more about your philosophy of having every engineer be full stack. That is not the usual setup.
Yash Gupta:
Initially, it was about efficiency and customer centricity. When an engineer owns a problem end-to-end, they keep the customer at the center. They iterate quickly without handoffs between backend, frontend, and others. If solving a customer problem requires AI, they use it instead of waiting for an AI specialist.
I know this does not scale indefinitely. At 100-plus engineers, you need specialists for deep problems. We are already seeing natural specialization in the team. My suggestion for early teams is do not overspecialize too soon, because you do not yet know which problems you will be solving in a year. Train existing people; they carry valuable context while acquiring new skills.
Aditya Anand:
Let’s talk about picking the problem statement. When you first entered this problem space, how did you narrow down what to solve?
Yash Gupta:
Be clear about the kind of business you want to build. There are boutique businesses with a ceiling and those that can become very large. For the latter, you must understand market size and ceiling. Look at broad markets, break them down, and consider geography, because realities differ by country.
Then consider passion and edge. Do you have a view on what you can do differently? We had a spreadsheet with over 150 ideas across industries, with columns for market size, what we could realistically capture, what we could do differently, and how passionate we felt. That is how we landed on group health insurance.
A few insights: even before COVID, healthcare inflation in India was around 25 percent year-on-year, much higher than salary growth. It was becoming unaffordable. COVID created an inflection point. A 10-day ICU stay could mean an 8 lakh rupee bill. Even if you make a crore a year, that is roughly a month’s salary pre-tax. Insurance becomes a critical proxy because payment flows through it.
In 2019, total annual health insurance premiums were around 50,000 crores, split between retail and corporate group insurance. Retail was slightly ahead then. We believed India would follow a path where employers pay for insurance for a growing segment, as government programs focus on the lower-income population. The white-collar, organized workforce would increasingly rely on employer-provided coverage. Group health was growing faster than retail because companies proactively buy for employees.
Corporate health insurance also lacked recent innovation. Retail had seen a lot, but corporate was owned by old-school brokers. It ticked our boxes: healthcare, finance, a big and growing market, limited innovation, and real problems to solve. HRs were unhappy, employees were unhappy, and even insurers were unhappy. One more learning after a few years: willingness to pay is critical. In India, selling B2B is hard, so you must be clear about what people will pay for.
Aditya Anand:
What is next for Nova Benefits over the next 6 to 12 months?
Yash Gupta:
We are building more on the day-to-day engagement layer, beyond checkups and mental health. One goal is to have 80 to 90 percent of users active weekly, with a meaningful definition of active: completing a physical activity check-in, a mental health check-in, sending or receiving gratitude, or similar. We want to make employee benefits a daily conversation where people feel good using our platform. We are also exploring cyber insurance, as discussed earlier.
Aditya Anand:
We might be your customer.
Yash Gupta:
We would love that. Any organization is a potential customer for us.
Aditya Anand:
Can you give examples of pricing ranges or a budget a company should have in mind for employee insurance or wellness services, and how to make the decision?
Yash Gupta:
On insurance, pricing is similar to retail, often with better coverage. For example, if a company offers employee-only coverage with a 5 lakh sum insured, it typically costs 5,000 to 8,000 rupees annually per employee. If you add spouse and children, it may go from around 7,000 to 12,000 to 15,000, depending on demographics. If you add parents, costs rise, but so does value, because most claims are from parents. Covering employee, spouse, children, and parents typically costs around 30,000 to 40,000 per employee per year, give or take. If you are paying an average of 10 lakhs a year in salary, that is under 4 percent of pay. The perceived value of a 4 percent increase in salary versus covering a 5 lakh hospital bill for a parent is very different. The latter often creates much more happiness.
On wellness, costs are more affordable. A basic health checkup can be 500 to 1,000 rupees, but a meaningful checkup with Vitamin D, HbA1c, and other markers is around 3,000 rupees per employee annually. Mental health offerings vary widely: from a basic hotline at around 100 rupees per employee per year to premium plans with quarterly emotional check-ins and high utilization at around 6,000 to 10,000. Gym memberships through B2B channels are often 10,000 to 15,000 per employee per year, still cheaper than retail rates due to volume discounts.
Aditya Anand:
If someone wants to get in touch with Nova Benefits, what is the best way to reach out or grab a demo?
Yash Gupta:
Message me or Saransh on LinkedIn, or go to our website and click Get a Demo. Our website is novabenefits.com.
Aditya Anand:
Thanks so much for doing this. It has been a very insightful and educational conversation. There is a lack of awareness about the insurance industry in general and about specific policies and what your company provides. There is a long road to go, but we take it one step at a time.
Yash Gupta:
Thanks for having me. Great questions. As you said, awareness matters: both about what your company is doing for you and about the organization’s role. People leaders cannot just take a checkbox approach. If you want impact and outcomes, you need people to use the benefits and get value from them. Both go hand in hand.
Aditya Anand:
All the best for Nova Benefits and the rest of your journey.