At the HLTH Conference in Las Vegas, a new kind of healthcare company took the stage and raised $4.5M like it meant business. Andel isn’t a startup chasing hype, it’s a cooperative pharmacy benefits platform built to do something almost radical in U.S. healthcare: make GLP-1 medications affordable for employers. Co-founded by Jay Bregman and Ritu Malhotra, PharmD, Andel is quietly changing how companies think about cost, coverage, and care.
Jay Bregman’s track record reads like a case study in execution: eCourier (acquired by Royal Mail), Hailo (sold to Daimler and folded into Lyft Europe), and Thimble (acquired by Arch Insurance in 2023). Three exits. $250M raised. Two continents. Now he’s turning that same precision toward pharmacy benefits. Ritu Malhotra spent two decades in the trenches of pharmacy benefit management, most recently as VP of Pricing and Network Product Innovation at CVS Health, before co-founding Andel to rebuild the model from inside the system she knows best.
Here’s the problem they’re attacking: 64% of employers don’t cover GLP-1s for weight loss, even as demand surges and healthcare costs climb another 10% in 2026. These drugs cost $1,000 a month before rebates. Employers can’t absorb that, but employees need access. Andel’s model flips the structure, pooling buying power across employers, negotiating directly with manufacturers, and letting companies choose their own subsidy levels. No PBM bloat. No hidden fees. Just a transparent path to care.
And the investors lining up tell you this isn’t small-time: Lightbank, Seedcamp, Bertelsmann Healthcare Investments, Houghton Street Ventures, Springboard, Semper Virens, and Citylight all joined the round. Each one saw the same thing, a founding team with enough experience to change how benefits work and a market ready to follow.
The platform itself handles prescription verification, next-day delivery, employer subsidy management, and transparent pricing in one app. Integration is plug-and-play with existing benefits cycles, so employers don’t need to blow up their infrastructure to join. The plan is simple: scale nationwide in 2026 and make Andel’s co-op model the new default for affordable GLP-1 access.
What makes Andel different isn’t just pricing, it’s philosophy. When a benefit platform aligns with its members instead of insurers, the entire incentive stack changes. That shift could ripple through how America pays for care. And if that happens, it won’t be because someone made a louder promise. It’ll be because Jay Bregman and Ritu Malhotra built a quieter, smarter one that actually worked.
