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We raised this round off the back of these key metrics:
- $2M in revenue
- 2 insurance contracts (more on the way)
- 15 FTEs
- $33m post money (up round)
Business fundamentals.
Most startups raise a Series-A at this point. We decided to raise an extension, because we think this amount of cash can give us more time to hit key milestones like accepting insurance, and improving our business fundamentals before we decide to aggressively scale.
Business fundamentals are everything from our margins, CAC payback period, and the overall unit economics.
We also need the ability to accept insurance for our services. Insurance is a key inflection point that will help us make Index Health accessible to 1B people, while helping drive the business to $1B in revenue in the coming years.
We need great fundamentals if we’re going to build a great business.
Why is insurance so important to the future of personalized medicine?
Insurance brings the cost of personalized medicine down significantly.
There are maybe a handful of small practices in the US that accept insurance for personalized medicine. And it typically takes months, or sometimes over a year to get an appointment.
But the vast majority of personalized medicine clinics only accept cash (and still have long wait times). It’s extremely expensive, sometimes costing well above $10,000 for an evaluation and treatment. The reason they don’t accept insurance is simple: small clinics are content with making $500,000 - $1M a year from a few hundred wealthy patients who are willing to pay their exorbitant fees.
On the flip side: while accepting insurance offers a higher revenue potential, it also costs a lot to manage it: from back-office employees to process the insurance claims, to dealing with the actual insurance company. For a small practice, it’s an impractical, expensive endeavor. More importantly, why do it when you’re content with serving a small population, and making up to $1M a year with cash-pay?
And for this reason, getting the highest quality, and most advanced medicine is completely unattainable by the vast majority of people who desperately need it.
And that’s why we exist.
Our goal is to make the highest quality, and most advanced form of medicine—personalized medicine— accessible to 1B people. In order to do that, we need to build the world’s largest specialist clinic that focuses on root cause diagnostics and treatments. And one of the main ways to lower that financial barrier, is to accept insurance.
The world’s most advanced medical company.
We believe that we are today, the most advanced medical company in America. The most advanced medical company doesn’t just provide a better user experience, it improves health outcomes dramatically better than anyone else.
Most healthcare players today focus on improving the experience, like offering telemedicine. The USP is simply: offer the convenience of seeing your doc on video. And then bring the pharmacy to your door quicker.
This is great, but it doesn’t improve patient outcomes—which is really the point of all this.
Today’s innovation just delivers the same outdated healthcare model that’s been around for 50+ years. But it does nothing to improve the actual health outcome of the patient.
What does a Zoom call really mean to a patient if they still have heart disease after every appointment, and after every refill?
While improving the experience is an obvious must have for any healthcare company including Index, our key focus is improving health outcomes using advanced diagnostics that collects up to 1,000 data points on an individual, and personalizing treatments that range from the right diet, to the right medication (and a plan to get off of medication), peptides treatments, personalized supplements, infusions, and more.
What about AI?
The most advanced medical company is also at the forefront of medical AI. What GitHub CoPilot does to help developers, we see Index CoPilot doing the same to help providers. How can we help providers make better, data-driven decisions?
- How can we correctly diagnose the root cause?
- What’s the most effective treatment for this individual?
- What do people in this age bracket, and diagnosis have in common?
- How can we help patients understand their own diagnosis better, and to make better informed decisions on a day to day level?
- Is there something the data isn’t telling us?
AI is at the center of Index Health, and it’s the future of medicine.
Key learnings.
As a final thought: we’re constantly reflecting on what we can do better as a company. Sometimes it’s in the data (and what the customers say), but oftentimes, it’s not. I’ll try to summarize that in 3 of the most important points:
- While we have a big, aggressive long term goal to serve 1B patients, we plan projects and goals in increments of 2-3 weeks. We learned early that we're bad at planning a few months out. Planning short term helps us hit our long term goals.
- Speaking to customers, and comparing qualitative feedback to behavioral data has consistently been our best ROI. Speaking to industry peers and comparing notes has also been super helpful. Data data data. And the answer is often in what the data isn't telling us.
- Most importantly: people are the most important asset you have. Always surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, both employees and investors.
Thanks to our existing investors Todor from Launchub and Michal from Inovo for leading this round.
