Rebuilding Health Insurance in MENA

In this edition of Founder’s Hustle, we sat down with Vaibhav Kashyap and Javed Akberali—co-founders of Wellx, the insurtech startup that’s rethinking health insurance from the ground up. This wasn’t just a story about building a company. It was about rebuilding an entire category. The goal? To turn health insurance into a wellness engine that saves lives and money.

Meet the Founders

Vaibhav grew up in the UAE with insurance in his DNA—his father spent decades in the industry. After studying it in the US, he spent four years underwriting at Zurich Insurance before moving into strategy consulting. But COVID-19 shifted his focus. “I saw all these startups raising money and thought, that looks easy,” he jokes. Drawn by the energy of the startup world, a chance meeting with Javed changed everything.

Born and raised in the UAE, Javed spent nearly two decades in banking, rising from mortgage operations to leading customer experience at Dubai Islamic Bank. His time in financial services exposed how traditional institutions often fall short for customers. When the pandemic hit, he saw an opening for reinvention. “I decided to leave the industry and start something on my own.” That decision led to a pivotal conversation with Vaibhav, who pitched the idea that would become Wellx. “This wasn’t just about insurance,” Javed says. “It was about how we live. I saw Uber-level potential”.

The Personal Catalyst

The spark behind Wellx was deeply personal. For Vaibhav, wellness wasn't just a concept, it was a hard-earned reality. "As a kid, I was obese. At my peak, I weighed 96 kilos," he shares candidly. "Eventually, I lost around 30 kilos, but that journey made one thing clear: I shouldn't have had to go through that in the first place."

This insight became the foundation of Wellx's philosophy. If there had been better education, more support, and real incentives to live healthier earlier in life, things could have been different.

The concept resonated immediately with Javed. "I still remember what Vaibhav told me," he recalls. "'After your friends and family, your insurer should care for you the most, because if you fall sick, they're the ones who pick up the bill.'" That single statement reframed everything. "Until then, I'd only ever looked at insurance as a rainy-day product. You buy it, hope you never use it, and hate every dirham you spend on it." Javed explains. "But what if that same insurer actually helped you live better? What if they cared enough to keep you healthy?”

Rewiring Healthcare Economics

The UAE’s healthcare system, like many others, suffers from a deep misalignment of incentives. Employers pay for insurance, but employees are the ones consuming it often with no visibility into the cost. “To the member, it feels free,” Vaibhav explains. “They have no reason not to go to the most expensive specialist for even a minor issue.”

This dynamic creates a broken feedback loop. Overuse drives up insurance costs, and insurers raise premiums. Employers, in turn, are forced to cut benefits or delay salary increases, but employees remain unaware of how their behavior affects the system, and companies are powerless to change anything.

Wellx aims to fix that. At the heart of the model was a clear insight: change behavior, realign incentives, and help everyone—employers, insurers, and members—save money in the long run.

Wellx Explained

Wellx is a digital health insurance platform that combines personalized wellness with real-world rewards.

Wellx partners with trusted insurers like Salama Insurance, Dubai National Insurance (DNI), Qatar Insurance Company, Al Rajhi Takaful, Liva Insurance and Abu Dhabi National Takaful to offer wellness-backed health insurance plans. These are fully digital products that users can explore, purchase, and activate entirely online. Whether you're an individual looking for personal coverage or a company seeking to enhance employee benefits, you can get started with Wellx by choosing a Wellx-enabled plan from one of its partner insurers.

Once a policy is activated, members receive clear instructions to download the Wellx app and connect their smartphone or wearables—like Fitbit, Apple Watch, or WHOOP—so the platform can track activity, sleep, and mindfulness, turn them into rewardable metrics, and thus encourage healthy lifestyles. 

“But it's not just surface-level tracking, we hyper-personalize the whole experience,” Javed explains. “You set your own goals and we just nudge you toward habits that help you stay healthy.” This personalization also considers context, like location and social setting, to reveal what truly drives well-being. “We don’t just ask, ‘Are you happy or sad?’” Javed says. “We ask: Who were you with? What were you doing?” These insights feed into detailed reports—for example, “You’re happiest when you’re at a game with friends.”

As users engage with their wellness goals, they earn xCoins. These digital tokens act as a reward system, and can be redeemed in the Wellx marketplace for prizes like Amazon vouchers, discounts on premium wellness brands, gym memberships, mental health sessions, and healthy meal subscriptions.

This gamified, reward-driven approach makes proactive health management more engaging, shifting the perception of insurance from a passive safety net to an active, daily companion in well-being.

Wellx's rewards engine is funded through two main models, depending on the insurer partnership:

1. Integrated Wellness Insurance Plans: In co-created, co-branded policies, the cost of rewards is built directly into the insurance product. Here, wellness incentives are part of the core value proposition, not just a nice-to-have. By embedding xCoins and cashback into the policy itself, insurers drive healthier behavior while simultaneously managing long-term claims costs.

2. Bolt-On Model: Wellx also partners with insurers to enhance existing plans. In this case, the insurer funds the rewards pool as a strategic investment. Wellx becomes a value-added layer on top of traditional products. By encouraging policyholders to adopt and maintain healthier lifestyles, the platform helps reduce doctor visits and ultimately lowers claim payouts for insurance providers.

Finally, to make the insurance experience more transparent and user-friendly for policyholders, Wellx has also created an AI-powered concierge that instantly answers questions about coverage, benefits, and policy details, eliminating the need to sift through dense documents.

Who Benefits—And Why It Makes Sense

Wellx creates a rare win-win-win for individuals, companies, and insurance providers.

For users, the benefits are immediate—they're rewarded for staying healthy through real financial perks like discounts, cashback, and personalized wellness tools. Employees gain greater control over their health, while companies see improved productivity, reduced absenteeism, and potentially more favorable insurance terms, including lower premiums or rate passes at renewal. The platform also goes a step further by powering company-wide wellness initiatives that actively foster a healthier, more engaged workforce. Through features like corporate leaderboards and custom wellness challenges—focused on steps, mindfulness, sleep, and more—it introduces friendly competition and collective goals that turn wellness into a shared experience. 

For insurers and reinsurers, the value is equally compelling. By promoting preventative behaviors and offering continuous engagement, Wellx helps reduce claim frequency and severity. Real-time health data gives insurers better insights into user behavior, enabling more accurate underwriting, tailored pricing, and smarter risk models. The result is a stronger, more data-driven relationship with policyholders; one built on ongoing engagement rather than reactive claims processing.

Confronting Industry Inertia

When Vaibhav and Javed first started pitching Wellx, they encountered resistance that bordered on hostility. "We were talking to dinosaurs," Javed says bluntly. Despite having access to C-suite executives in the UAE's top insurance firms, those early conversations were sobering. One meeting with a prominent CEO exemplified the industry's mindset.

"We're sitting with the CEO, and I'm talking to him about improving the health and well-being of their customers, and how it ultimately benefits everyone—including them. I spent 30 minutes laying out this big vision," Javed recalls. The CEO's response was chilling: "You keep saying 'I'm sure you care about this' or 'I'm sure you care about that.' I don't. I don't care about any of the things you mentioned. I only care about shareholder happiness.”

Perhaps the most revealing moment came when the Wellx team proposed a bold idea to an insurer: run baseline blood tests on all members in their portfolio to understand their actual state of health. One insurer responded with unusual candor: “If we do that and people find out what’s wrong with them, they’ll end up going to the hospital to fix it. That’ll cost me money.”Javed pushed back: “Yes, it might cost you today, but you’ll save money tomorrow.” The insurer replied, “I just want to save money today. Tomorrow is another problem.” The exchange captured the industry’s short-term mindset—exactly what Wellx is determined to disrupt.

The Validation Strategy

Wellx didn’t follow the typical startup playbook of identifying a pain point, validating it, building an MVP, and then testing the market. Instead, they flipped the script: don’t build anything until someone’s ready to pay.

“We started with the reinsurer,” Javed explains. “We pitched Munich Re the idea of a product that rewards people for being healthy.” The reinsurer was intrigued and agreed to a pilot. 

But Wellx had no product. “We had built nothing,” Vaibhav says. So they hacked together a prototype. Vaibhav secured access to a free step-tracking app, layered it with WHOOP data, and used off-the-shelf tools to simulate the Wellx experience. It wasn’t perfect but it worked. The prototype led to their first paying client: Munich Re. That, in turn, opened doors to Dubai National Insurance (DNI) and Salama Insurance.

"In total, we sold 76 insurance policies," Vaibhav says. "Which is very little. But it validated that someone was willing to pay.” The early traction proved just enough to raise a $200,000 pre-seed round from 500 Global as part of their accelerator program.

The WHOOP Hail Mary

One of Wellx’s boldest plays was aiming for a partnership with WHOOP, the $4.5 billion fitness wearable giant. The idea sparked from a casual observation. "We had just finished playing paddle when I spotted someone wearing a WHOOP. I turned to Vaibhav and said, ‘What if we partnered with them?’ He just started laughing," Javed recalls. Vaibhav’s reaction was fair: “Dude, they’re a $4.5 billion company. We barely have a name.”

Despite the long shot, they emailed WHOOP. Six weeks later, to their surprise, WHOOP replied with interest. “We pitched them, and they loved it. But at that point, we didn’t even have a company. No incorporation, no office. The contract was literally between Vaibhav and WHOOP Inc. using my home address.”

The idea turned into something real. Wellx wanted to personalize insurance by using real-time health data to reward people for healthy habits—exactly the kind of insights WHOOP’s wearables deliver. For WHOOP, the partnership opened a new use case: embedding its tech into a wellness-focused insurance model in a fast-growing region. As part of the deal, Wellx members received significant discounts on WHOOP products, making it easier to adopt the wearable and start benefiting from the wellness ecosystem. It was a win-win.

The partnership proved transformative. "We maximized the brand value to its fullest," Javed says. "To this day, people still say, ‘Look, I’ve got my Wellx on my wrist’—they mean WHOOP, but the association stuck."

Real-World Impact

That kind of early momentum helped Wellx quickly demonstrate its real-world value. One of their first success stories came from a single mother of three, adjusting to post-divorce life while working remotely. Isolated and low on energy, she joined a Wellx corporate challenge through her company. She topped the leaderboard, began going into the office weekly, and found a renewed sense of community and purpose. Another user, hit hard by COVID and left with no motivation, used the platform to get back on track. The competition got him moving again, he dropped 5 kilos, regained his energy, and reengaged with work and life.

Today, Wellx has over 57,000 members in the UAE across 350+ SMEs and corporations. And the data is clear: users who are most actively engaged with the platform are seeing up to 25% fewer insurance claims—proof that healthier habits can directly translate into cost savings.

Beyond individual transformations, Wellx is achieving something rare in the insurance industry: rate passes at renewal. “In insurance, a rate pass—renewing your policy without a premium increase—is like a unicorn,” Javed explains. “Premiums typically rise 10% year over year, because insurers are always chasing last year’s claims.”

By attracting and maintaining a healthier, more engaged population, Wellx can offer employers stable or even reduced premiums. “That’s real value, not just in wellness, but in dollars saved.” 

Scaling and Expansion

To date, Wellx has raised $3.2 million—$2 million in seed funding followed by an extension led by DASH Ventures—and is now preparing for its Series A. “There’s strong demand, new geographies to enter, and a lot more to build on the AI front,” says Vaibhav. “To meet that, we need to grow the team and move fast.”

Wellx recently expanded into Saudi Arabia, with their first customer live and more in the pipeline. Their operational edge? They're not a broker, insurer, or TPA. “We’re a tech service provider to insurers—a platform for companies,” Vaibhav explains. Because they’re not underwriting risk themselves, they don’t need to go through the complex and time-consuming process of getting regulated as an insurer in each country. Instead, by being regulated in DIFC and soon in the Cayman Islands—both internationally recognized financial hubs—they can legally and efficiently operate across multiple markets without needing local insurance licenses. “Getting locally regulated in every country would be a nightmare,” he says.

Looking ahead, Vaibhav envisions a shift in how people engage with health and insurance. “In five years, we’ll power lifestyle subscriptions that care for you proactively and personally, including when things go wrong.” Inspired by leaders like Vinod Khosla, he imagines a future where “primary care is nearly free, diagnostics are ultra-low-cost, and an AI doctor—fed by your centralized health data—can intervene before issues escalate.”

Health First, Insurance Follows

When Vaibhav and Javed first entered the health insurance space, they weren’t just building a startup, they were stepping into an industry that hadn’t changed in decades. What they found was a sector shaped by outdated systems, misaligned incentives, and a legacy of mistrust. In the Gulf, many only bought insurance to meet visa requirements—ticking a box, not seeking care. 

But Vaibhav and Javed saw opportunity where others saw stagnation. As Javed puts it, “ we didn’t try to fix a broken system, we built a new one.” They reimagined health insurance not as a commodity, but “as a catalyst for better living.” In their words, it’s a product where “health comes first, and insurance simply follows.”

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