Medallion is out to reduce the amount of administrative work health care providers do so they can spend more time with patients. The San Francisco-based startup, which was founded in 2020 and just raised $20 million in new funding, is starting with medical licensing and credentialing.
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The company’s platform provides an automated way to enable health care organizations to license their providers in new states, verify and monitor credentials, and achieve in-network coverage with insurance payers.
Spark Capital led the investment, with Optum Ventures, BoxGroup and Susa Ventures, as well as a group of individual investors, including Tom Lee, Joe Montana, Elad Gil, Zach Sims, Daniel Gross, Peter Reinhardt, Nat Friedman, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the founders of Ro, PillPack, Carbon Health and Nurx also participating in the round.
The investment includes both a $3 million seed and $17 million Series A, according to Medallion founder and CEO Derek Lo.
The company has signed prominent clients in the health care sector, including Ro, Ginger and Bicycle Health.
“We will continue executing on our road map and have some exciting new automations coming out soon, as well as building out our go-to-market team to scale,” Lo said.
He said he came up with the idea for Medallion while visiting last year with Zachariah Reitano, CEO of telehealth startup Ro, who expressed pain points in managing medical licensing and how antiquated the process was.
“It was an inception moment for me, and we launched a couple months after that,” Lo added.
Health care professionals need to hold a medical license for the state in which they practice, but for telemedicine purposes, in order to prescribe medication to someone they need a license in the state in which the patient resides. According to Lo’s research, just 14 U.S. physicians held licenses in all 50 states as of 2018.
“Medallion alone is licensing several dozen physicians and nurse practitioners in all 50 states currently,” he said.
More than $800 billion is spent annually on health care administration costs. Since being founded in 2020, the company’s revenue has tripled quarter over quarter, according to Lo. He estimates Medallion’s platform has saved its customers 80,000 administrative work hours, based on an average of 15 hours to complete paperwork manually and another 10 hours on the insurance side per enrollment.
Lo said the funding will be used to grow Medallion’s team. The startup currently has 30 full-time employees and plans to double that over the next year. Lo is also looking at R&D, go-to-market and operations as other areas to invest in.
As part of the investment, Natalie Sandman, an investor at Spark Capital, is joining Medallion’s board.
This investment is Sandman’s second health care investment, and she was also involved in Spark’s funding of Noyo, which is developing infrastructure for health insurance. She said she considers Medallion similar to Noyo in that it is building infrastructure, but for the digital health space.
She found Lo to be “super sharp,” and with Optum Ventures joining the round, Sandman said he is in a good position to execute on his longer term vision.
“The health care industry as a whole is going through a strong transformation, and every specialty is being reimagined,” Sandman said in an interview. “The problem Medallion is trying to solve is one that is ripe for technology and innovation so that it is just as easy to hire a provider as it is to hire an employee.”
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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