Philadelphia’s fast-growing Pareto Health is getting a big Warburg Pincus investment
Pareto, which helps small- and mid-sized companies self-insure for health care has grown to 200 employees from 30 in 2019.
Pareto Health, a fast-growing Philadelphia company that helps smaller employers self-insure for employee health benefits, announced Monday that Warburg Pincus had joined as a private-equity investor in the firm.
Pareto previously secured an $80 million private-equity investment from Great Hill Partners in September 2019. Since then, Pareto has grown to 2,200 employers from 800. Its reach has extended to 400,000 from 100,000 covered employees.
About 200 of its affiliated employers, with 35,000 employees, are in the Philadelphia area.
Pareto, based in Center City, has seen its own employment ranks jump to 200 from 30, said Pareto founder and CEO Andrew Cavenagh.
Cavenagh, a Swarthmore College graduate who founded Pareto in 2011, did not disclose the size of the Warburg Pincus investment, but a news release said that Great Hill and Warburg Pincus have equal stakes in the company. Given Pareto’s growth, Warburg must have invested more than $80 million.
The motivation “was to get another super smart and sophisticated investor in our boardroom,” Cavenagh said, citing what he described as Warburg’s proven track record in health care and insurance.
Pareto’s clients average 170 employees. Historically, such firms would have been too small to self-insure.
Self-insured employers pays their employees’ health-care bills directly instead of buying insurance from a company such as Independence Blue Cross or Aetna.
Self-insuring can help companies to save money, but also carries risks. To avoid the volatility that can come with self-insurance, Pareto arranges for groups of employers to band together to smooth out the impact of extremely costly episodes of care, including cell and gene therapies with prices of more than $1 million per dose.
Cavenagh said he sees three big health insurance trends affecting small- and medium-sized businesses: Overall costs are rising, volatility caused by catastrophic claims is increasing, and multiyear claims related to specialty drugs are becoming more common.
“Regular insurers don’t do a good job of protecting employers from that. That is our specialty,” he said.