Hundreds of digital health startups are hoping to land their products on the menu of work-sponsored employee benefits.Another startup is hoping to make it easier.

New York-based brokerage firm Nava Benefits has unveiled a search engine designed to help small and midsized employers shop for digital health and wellness benefits. Officially unveiled on Tuesday, the Nava Benefits Search Engine also could help digital health startups find a market for their products, according to Brandon Weber, co-founder and CEO of Nava.

“If you talk to many of the innovative digital health vendors, they will say they don’t even get a shot to work with the small and medium-sized employers,” Weber said in a Zoom interview.It was the challenges faced by employers, however, that initially fueled development of the search engine. Nava, a health insurance brokerage founded in 2019, was hearing from human resources professionals that it was hard to sift through the range of ancillary benefits available to employees, Weber said.

Professionals relied on Google searches, advice from peers and recommendations from brokers, a hit-or-miss process, Weber said. “There is no single place to go to get unbiased, peer-review information.”Nava set out to build a place.

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