H1 is curating a database of doctors around the world, providing a tool for pharmaceutical companies to find key opinion leaders (KOL), clinical trial market intelligence, and rising stars in certain specialties.
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“There are times, like when pharmaceutical companies are doing clinical trials, that they don’t know which doctors are in a particular field,” H1 co-founder and CEO Ariel Katz told Crunchbase News. “We hope to balloon that also into a different vision, such as helping people figure out which doctor to go to, help doctors learn about each other, and for hospitals to use it to learn more about their faculty.”
This 3-year-old platform for the health care ecosystem, headquartered New York, has attracted more investor attention in the way of a $58 million Series B round of funding. The round was co-led by IVP and Menlo Ventures and included Lux Capital, Transformation Capital, Lead Edge Capital, Novartis dRx and Y Combinator.
The Series B closely follows H1’s announcement of its $12.9 million Series A round, led by Menlo Ventures, in April. In all, the company has raised $70.9 million in venture-backed funding, Katz said.
Since 2017, Katz and co-founder Ian Sax have grown H1 to nearly 250 employees and anticipate more, especially as the company expands into Europe and Asia. It also now counts 13 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies as clients, Katz said.
“Half of our users are outside of the United States, so we want to build out additional product lines that take into account time zones and languages,” he added. “We want to become a source of truth for doctors.”
The platform itself has more than 9 million in-depth profiles on health care professionals and 16,000 institutions in more than 70 countries.
Katz considers H1 in the health information technology market, competing against companies such as health care intelligence platforms Komodo Health and Definitive Healthcare. However, he sees the global nature of H1 being a differentiator.
“You can go into H1 and search for ‘heart failure,’ and find every doctor working in that field, or thought leader to see what they are working on. H1 has brought the whole world together,” he added.
As part of the investment, Somesh Dash, general partner at IVP, is joining the H1 board. Meanwhile, IVP Partner Michael Miao, Menlo Ventures Partner J.P. Sanday and Lux Partner Deena Shakir are joining as board observers.
Dash said in an interview that IVP looks for breakout growth opportunities and felt H1 fit that bill, especially during the global pandemic. When he met Katz, Dash said he was “blown away,” not only by how young Katz is, but of his deep understanding of the market and his clear mission.
“When I saw their approach, I thought that this is like what LinkedIn was in the early days to create efficiencies,” Dash said. “We talked about their goal of eradicating diseases and their ability to extend to other areas. There is a market that can exist for smaller diseases and can use H1 to figure out who can promote them. There might be even diseases that emerge that H1 can solve the quest of building therapeutics.”
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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