Brighter, a healthcare software company that helps health insurers transform passive patients into active healthcare consumers, today announced that it has raised $21 million in Series D financing led by General Catalyst Partners with participation from DAG Ventures and existing investors, Mayfield, Benchmark and Tenaya.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Jake Winebaum in 2011, Brighter's platform dramatically improves the dental patient experience and outcomes by actively engaging members with dentists that provide high value care. The Brighter marketplace and Brighter ScoreTM empower members with unprecedented price, quality and service transparency so that they can maximize the benefits of their dental plan. For example, patients can see the dramatic variation in their co-pay from dentist to dentist (as much as 300% among in-network dentists in the same zip code), and which dentists have the best patient ratings and professional experience.

As healthcare's first multi-sided marketplace platform, Brighter also enables providers to maximize their participation in carrier networks by more efficiently marketing their practices' services and strengths to new patients and enabling them to stay directly connected with existing patients. Thousands of providers nationwide are already improving their patients' experience while reducing their marketing and administrative expenses with their free Brighter ProfileTM and online Brighter ScheduleTM.

'Jake and his team have built something truly unique: a transparent healthcare marketplace that empowers consumers to improve their health while reducing their costs, and enables carriers and providers to effectively engage with patients,' said Gabe Ling, partner, General Catalyst. 'We couldn't be more excited to support Jake and the Brighter team as they continue on their journey to revolutionize the $140B dental services market.'

Ling joins fellow investors Benchmark's Bill Gurley, Mayfield's Navin Chaddha and Tenaya's Stewart Gollmer on Brighter's board of directors along with Jason Kilar and Matt Coffin.

Health insurance carriers and benefit plan administrators seeking to transform their dental plans by increasing member engagement and satisfaction while reducing costs can integrate Brighter into their existing benefit plans and digital platforms and more closely connect their dental benefits to overall population health management strategies.

Cigna, a global health service company, recently announced the launch of Brighter's software and services to its over 11 million Dental PPO members and 139,000 participating dentists. Brighter will launch its second major carrier partner in early 2017.

'Bringing technology and consumerism to healthcare takes patience and perseverance,' said Jake Winebaum, founder and CEO, Brighter. 'We have spent the past five years refining our consumer-centric platform which enables insurance carriers to engage their customers with the level of transparency and digital convenience that consumers have come to expect in every other aspect of their lives. With this financing and our carrier partners, we are reaching a scale where we can transform the patient, provider, and payer experience across this large and important dental healthcare sector.'

The company will use the proceeds of the financing to actively recruit enterprise software product and engineering talent to continue to innovate and expand the capabilities of the Brighter platform across additional carrier partners.

About Brighter
Headquartered in Santa Monica, CA, Brighter's mission is to use technology and consumerism to transform passive patients into active health care consumers. The Brighter platform seamlessly connects patients, providers and payers to reduce administrative and claims costs while providing members with a powerful, transparent and engaging online and mobile experience. For more information, visit Brighter.com.

About General Catalyst
General Catalyst Partners is a venture capital firm that makes early-stage and transformational investments. The firm backs exceptional entrepreneurs who are building innovative technology companies and market-leading businesses, including Airbnb, BigCommerce, ClassPass, Datalogix, Datto, Demandware, Gusto (fka ZenPayroll), The Honest Company, HubSpot, KAYAK, Oscar, Snapchat, Stripe, and Warby Parker. General Catalyst has offices in Cambridge, MA, Palo Alto, CA, and New York City. For more information, visit: generalcatalyst.com or follow GC on Twitter @gcvp.