Innovaccer raised a new round of funding and more than doubled its valuation to $3.2 billion, from $1.3 billion in February this year, as a growing number of healthcare organisations switch to the platform. of the San Francisco-based company to put your data to better use.
Over the past two decades, most industries have embraced technology to bring efficiencies to their businesses and accelerate their growth. The healthcare industry, by contrast, has been the last frontier to adopt the technology in many ways, said Abhinav Shashank, co-founder and chief executive of Innovaccer, in an interview with TechCrunch.
Mubadala Capital led the $150 million Series E round, bringing the startup’s all-time increase to more than $375 million. Whalerock Capital, Avidity Partners and Schonfeld Strategic Advisors, as well as existing investors including Tiger Global, B Capital Group, Microsoft’s M12 fund and Steadview Capital also participated in the round.
“We haven’t been able to drive that kind of transformation. Moreover, most systems that have been built for this space are non-cloud,” he said, adding that this has resulted in troves of data sitting in siloed systems.
The startup, which began its journey in India, has developed a cloud software layer that works on top of the existing systems of healthcare facilities and enables patient data to be accessed and analysed.
Healthcare facilities “don’t need to replace their existing systems. Our cloud tier is connected to a number of their existing electronic health record systems, ”said Shashank.
Getting better access enables patients to supply and make use of even more data — such as insurance or medical data generated by fitness trackers — they have on themselves. “This creates a 360-degree view of the patient.” Moreover, this allows doctors to get deeper and real-time visibility into the patient’s health status.
The business-focused startup has attracted over 50 clients, including Banner Health, Roche and MercyOn, in the US and parts of Europe. Recently signed clients include One Medical, Roche, CommonSpirit, Franciscan Health, Dayton Children’s Health Partners, St. Luke’s Health System, Sentara, Adventist Health, Premier Health, Children’s Health Alliance, Premier Health, Atlantic Health System, Providence St. Joseph, Cityblock, Florence Health and Zus Health.
If a hospital or other healthcare facility works with Innovaccer, the patient data remains with this facility as it stands. Other healthcare providers do not have access to this data. This is one of the challenges many entrepreneurs hope to solve.
Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, for example, hopes his blockchain network will become a universal standard to the point that any patient anywhere in the world can quickly give a doctor permission to see their records at an event of an emergency. But we’re not there yet. Shashank suggested that in the years to come, if healthcare providers opened up, they could agree to a universal protocol and such an interoperable system would then work.
One of the reasons he’s optimistic is the growing interest of big tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple in health tech. “They want us to be successful, and we build systems that run on their clouds. So there is tremendous synergy in approaching the market, ”he said.
The startup, which won its first client in 2016, has grown rapidly in recent years, he said. “Our focus is on the US market. At some point we will also expand internationally. But given the scale of the problem we have in the US itself, this is what we will largely focus on in the short term.”
Innovaccer’s growth is one of the biggest Indian SaaS success stories. Shashank, pointing to the success of many SaaS startups that started in India, Australia or Southeast Asia, told SaaS entrepreneurs that “the world has never been flatter as the delivery model is cloud-based. I don’t think it has ever been easier for entrepreneurs to create a global software company of considerable size and scope, ”he said.
Innovaccer will devote fresh funds to strengthen its research and development, as well as attract more talent to work in the product, development and customer service areas.
“We have been investors in Innovaccer since 2019, and believe that the company has all the necessary pillars to define the new gold standard of how the Health Cloud should be implemented by providers, payers, and life science companies,” said Alaa Halawa, Partner and Head of the US Ventures business at Mubadala Capital, in a statement.
Hundreds of technology companies have tried to create a common data structure to connect the healthcare industry, but they all have failed because of the extreme complexity of the industry or technology challenges. But in five short years, Innovaccer has built the most successful data activation platform in the healthcare industry, as evidenced by the industry’s record pace of adoption. Innovaccer is arguably the first and only company since the invention of the electronic health record (EHR) that has the ability to unify the healthcare ecosystem.
