Health Tech Company Color Inks $1.5B Valuation With $167M Series D

Health technology company Color, headquartered in Burlingame, California, on Monday announced its largest funding to date: $167 million in Series D funding.

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Color focuses on population-scale health care programs and clinical testing, developing infrastructure and software so that large populations can receive essential health care services, such as telehealth and testing for preventative care and infectious disease management, directly where they live or work, Color co-founder and CEO Othman Laraki told Crunchbase News.

“We are in an important phase of health care in the country, and the pandemic brought that into focus, even though public health was an issue before the pandemic,” Laraki said.

The Series D includes a $75 million tranche the company raised back in January 2020, Laraki said. It brings its total financing to $278 million and gives Color a valuation of $1.5 billion. Prior to this round, the company raised an $80 million Series C round in 2017, according to Crunchbase data.

Existing investors General Catalyst, and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., led the round with participation from Viking Global Investors, the company said.

Health care is one of the biggest sectors of the economy and accounts for the biggest gap between cost and the value we get, Laraki said. In addition, while most of our lives are entrenched in technology, the fundamental delivery of health care has not changed much.

“The biggest function is increased access, and that has not yet happened in health care,” he added. “It is high-time for big change.”

The investment will be used to continue developing the public health technology and infrastructure for customers, which include governments, schools and local employers that serve large populations, Laraki said.

Meanwhile, Color is working mainly in California and Massachusetts and is also rolling out vaccine delivery systems to state and local governments and employers. Laraki said one of the biggest challenges to health care is scaling and logistics.

“We are very involved with larger public health initiatives around managing the COVID crisis and exit, investing in employers bringing back workers and schools bringing teachers and students back in,” Laraki said. “With the vaccine rollout, we have a big role to play in the last mile, so we are spending a lot of time on that.”

Illustration: Dom Guzman