Our story

In 2013, Nava’s founders were brought in from Silicon Valley to help fix HealthCare.gov after its failed launch. Although the immediate focus was on making the service available, the team quickly realized that better firefighting would never lead to stronger foundations. Instead, they asked: What would a reliable, intuitive HealthCare.gov experience look like? How could we build better long-term solutions as quickly as possible?

Nava staff at the White House in 2016.

Better foundations, not better facades

Over the next 18 months, they built several products and systems that still serve tens of millions of people today, dramatically improving the user experience and service reliability, while cutting call center wait times and hundreds of millions of dollars in costs.

HealthCare.gov was the catalyst for a number of things ready to sprout. It gave innovators within government the justification they needed to advance their changes. It provided a unifying narrative for attracting and growing technical teams within the government. It exposed the brittleness of the way technology was specified and procured. It laid bare the need for modern methods and vendors who used them. 

Nava’s founders recognized that modern technology skills could help our public institutions be more effective, efficient, and adapt to the challenges of the digital age. In 2015, they formed Nava as a public benefit corporation to transform government services, programs, and agencies using skills in engineering, data, design, and product delivery.

Progress takes work

Since then, we’ve been trusted by the federal, state, and local governments across the US to solve some of the most complex and highly scrutinized modernization efforts in the public sector.

We’ve worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs, helping to reduce the backlog of Veterans waiting for decisions about their benefits by 50% in one year. We broke ground when we launched developer-friendly APIs for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that transformed how doctors get paid to provide quality healthcare for the country’s 62 million Medicare recipients. We helped launch Massachusetts’ groundbreaking paid family medical leave service, supporting the payment of over $600 million in claims to over 90,000 claimants. We helped multiple states adapt their unemployment insurance systems in the pandemic, reducing backlogs and launching user-friendly experiences.

Thinking long term

Today, Nava has grown to over 500 people working with federal, state, and local agencies across the country. As a technology company and public benefit corporation, we remain dedicated to making public services simple and effective in a world of constant change.