Google just invested $32 million in Oscar, a billion-dollar startup that wants to shake up healthcare

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Oscar

Oscar CEO and co-founder Mario Schlosser, co-founders Kevin Nazemi and Joshua Kushner.

Google Capital has invested $32.5 million in Oscar, a health insurance startup, The Wall Street Journal reports.

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The new funding values Oscar, which had in April raised $145 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, at $1.75 billion.

Oscar was founded a few years ago but launched publicly in July 2013.

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Oscar lets users talk to doctors on the phone for free, and it was the first insurance company to give fitness trackers to its customers to let them get rewards for walking a certain number of steps in a day.

The company has more than 40,000 users in New Jersey and New York, Oscar CEO Mario Schlosser told Business Insider earlier this year. Soon, Oscar will expand to cover users in Texas and California, the company tells The Wall Street Journal.

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Some of Oscar's funding - which now totals more than $300 million - is covering its losses, the Journal reports. Last year its losses totaled $27.5 million, according to an estimate Oscar gave to New York's insurance regulator. Its revenue in 2014 was $56.9 million, according to the same filing.

Founded in 2013 by entrepreneur and venture capitalist Joshua Kushner, Microsoft's former director of health care Kevin Nazemi, and former McKinsey & Company computer scientist Mario Schlosser, Oscar rivals established health insurance companies like Aetna and UnitedHealth.

Last year, Oscar had just 15,000 users signed up, so it's growing rapidly. Users can buy health insurance coverage from the marketplaces created under the Affordable Care Act. The company uses technology and design to make its statements and services easy for anyone to understand.

Schlosser told Business Insider in April that in New York, its market share is upwards of 12%. "The biggest reason why we now decided to raise a new round of capital is that we think the opportunity we originally saw is even bigger than we realized early on," Schlosser tells Business Insider. "We started three years ago with the very distinct idea of creating a better user interface for healthcare, and most specifically health insurance."

You can read the full Wall Street Journal report here.

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