If we’ve learned anything during the pandemic, it is that many of our regular doctor’s visits can take place virtually, with the quality of care similar to being there in person.
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K Health, providing a data-driven digital primary care system, is proving this to be the case. The company, headquartered in New York, is now on its third round of funding in a year, having closed on a $132 million Series E round of funding–its largest to date, Scott Chesrown, chief operating officer of K Health confirmed in an interview.
Notable investors in the Series E included GGV Capital, Valor Equity Partners and the Kaiser Permanente pension fund. They were joined by LTS Investments, Atreides Ventures, 14W, Max Ventures, PICO Partners, Marcy Venture Partners, Primary Ventures and BoxGroup.
With this round, K Health has raised roughly $273.3 million since the company was founded in 2016. That includes a $42 million Series D round in November and $48 million Series C raised last February.
The funds will be deployed similarly to previous rounds in that the company intends to add talent to areas including marketing, customer support, product and engineering. K Health has 150 employees on the company side and is also supporting 180 full-time physicians on the platform.
“We need a wide base of human capital, including several hundred more physicians,” Chesrown said.
How it works
K Health works by leveraging artificial intelligence-driven health data accumulated by tracking billions of anonymized health events. (That data was collected by Maccabi, the second-largest HMO in Israel.)
The company takes that data and creates a predictive model aimed at enabling users to learn more about their health by comparing themselves to people with similar characteristics–gender, age, symptoms, medical history, etc.–through a “symptom tracker,” which is free to use, Chesrown said.
The other part of the platform–the telemedicine component–offers real-time dialogue with a board-certified physician, who can initiate a video and/or ask for photos. The platform is $19 for a one-time visit or $9 per month with a membership, he added.
In addition to the funding round, K Health launched its newest offering, K for Parents virtual pediatrics. Similar to its telemedicine platform, K for Parents provides immediate access to doctors and ongoing, remote pediatric care for children ages 3-17.
Growth
Since Chesrown joined the company in 2019, K Health has grown to 300,000 members, and the platform was used 4 million times with 5 million conversations with the platform’s AI.
“That is the same as several hundred doctors would do in their lifetimes,” he said. “It shows people are engaging and using it. We have an eagerness to get the product into more people’s hands.”
Each quarter, the product, users and revenue doubled, and much of the trajectory was driven by COVID-19, “throwing us in the mainstream,” Chesrown added, so much so that revenue grew 1,000 percent since the global pandemic started.
Looking forward, K Health plans to expand its offering in the U.S., as well as attract more pediatricians to its platform. The company is also developing new functions and capabilities around mental health, as well as its integrated pharmacy offering–physicians are able to prescribe medicine and testing, as well as schedule mailed prescriptions when there is more frequent need. K Health is also thinking globally, working on expanding its platform into other languages, Chesrown said.
As part of the investment, both Valor Equity Partners’ founder and CEO Antonio Gracias and GGV Capital’s Managing Partner Hans Tung will join K Health’s board of directors.
Tung met K Health co-founder and CEO Allon Bloch in 2016, and told Crunchbase News this is the firm’s first investment in the company.
“When Allon shared this vision, at first I thought ‘this guy is crazy,’ talking about taking hospital data and patient data and getting regulators to play ball. It seemed so hard to make it work,” Tung said. “Fast-forward to last year when we met up again, we were chatting about COVID-19 and how it changed how people process and share data. I thought he did a great job of blocking and tackling over the years, and especially in 2020.”
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias
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