Canopy Financial, a three-year-old firm that provides health insurance-related online banking interfaces and processing services, on Thursday said it received $15 million in a funding round led by Granite Global Ventures.

The business of providing online banking technology is generally the province of large banks or large specialty processing tech firms, but health care savings accounts and consumer-driven health care are relatively new concepts.

Federal legislation passed in 2003 created tax incentives for consumers to have the option of paying routine health care expenses directly -- from health care savings accounts (HSAs).

The savings accounts work in conjunction with high-deductible health insurance policies that protect the consumers from the financial crunch of catastrophic medical expenses.

Canopy, which has offices in San Francisco and Chicago, provides the online technology that supports HSAs for banks such as Wachovia and Sovereign Bank.

The company also provides online health care banking programs for insurance firms such as Caremark, and online insurance brokers such as eHealthInsurance.

Canopy has now raised a total of $21 million and the company said it will use the funds to develop and market some of its new products and services.

"We did about $9 million in revenue last year which is an increase of about 14 times over the previous year," said Vik Kashyap, CEO of Canopy, and a former VC.

One of Canopy's new products is a beta site, MyCanopy.com, that allows employers to opt out of the expensive business of supplying group health insurance benefits and instead give employees a fixed amount of money every month.

"And individual employees can use the site to buy their own high-deductible health insurance and manage their entire health care financial picture from this location," Mr. Kashyap said.