Health Care Startup Nomi Health Raises $110M To Expand Pop-Up Clinics, Payment Platform

Direct health care company Nomi Health has raised $110 million in its Series A funding round, money that will help the startup, which aims to reduce the cost of health care for employers and patients, expand its offerings across the country, company leaders told Crunchbase News. 

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Nomi Health sits outside the box when it comes to traditional health care models in the United States, landing somewhere between health care provider and fintech startup. It has around 200 pop-up clinics, or “health hubs” with about 2,500 doctors and nurses on its payroll, as well as seven laboratories around the country. 

It also offers a platform that connects care providers at other clinics and hospitals to patients via an employer, county, school or some other organization that signs up to use the product. 

The round, announced Wednesday, was led by Rose Park Advisors and Arbor Ventures. 

“There is no doubt that by transforming the way health care is bought and paid for, we can transform care outcomes and experiences for the better across the ecosystem, from buyer to patient to provider,” said Melissa Cannon Guzy, co-founder and managing partner of Arbor Ventures. “Nomi Health’s visionary team, guided by established leaders from fintech to health care, are well poised to rewire this broken system in the near term and beyond.”

One thing Nomi is not, however, is insurance. In fact, company founder Mark Newman said his base thesis is that health care is cheaper and can be administered faster without insurance or co-pays for patients. And that’s what Nomi is trying to prove. 

“The irony is that by going from the money that the employer pays for health care to the insurance company to the provider, about 30 percent to 40 percent is actually lost,” he told Crunchbase News. “We take a different approach, because we say, ‘You don’t need a health plan when you are in a self-funded environment; what you actually need is a purchasing platform and a payment platform.’” 

Nomi also runs pop-up clinics in 12 states, serving about 30,000 people a day. That part of the company’s model took off during the pandemic, when hospitals and clinics struggled under the weight of the high demand for COVID-19 testing and vaccinations in the U.S. The startup, which launched in 2019, created early partnerships with counties to set up mobile testing and vaccination clinics, where people could get swabbed or jabbed at no cost to the patient, and little cost to the government, Newman said.  

The pop-up clinics aren’t hospitals one would go to for a surgery or chronic issue that requires specialist care, but are tailor-made to handle things like standard screenings or vaccinations and diagnose colds or other common ailments. 

Nomi’s long-term goal, Newman said, is that those pop-up clinics will serve 100,000 patients a day within the next two years, and that its platform would be available to any employer in the U.S. that wants it. 

“In terms of where we want to serve people, it’s where they have always struggled to access the care that they need, at a cost that they can actually afford,” Newman said. “So we want to continue to serve that population and we’ll be adding more services and creating a bigger and bigger footprint nationally.” 

Illustration: Dom Guzman