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Digital elective care and telemedicine provider Ro raises $200 million at a reported $1.5 billion valuation
In three years Zachariah Reitano’s startup, Ro, has managed to hit a reported $1.5 billion valuation for its transformation from a company focused on treating erectile dysfunction to a telemedicine service for a range of elective and urgent care-focused treatments.
Through Rory for women’s health, Roman for men’s health and Zero for smoking cessation, Reitano and fellow co-founders Saman Rahmanian, and Rob Schutz, built a company that now treats 20 conditions, including sexual health, weight loss, dermatology, allergies and more, according to a statement from the company.
Image Credit: Zero
Ro also has a new pharmacy business, Ro Pharmacy, which is an online cash pay pharmacy offering more than 500 generic medications for just $5 per month per drug. And the company is getting into the weight loss business through a partnership with the private equity-backed healthcare company, Gelesis.
Ro’s also becoming a gateway into patient acquisition for primary care providers through Ribbon Health, and a test-case for the use of Pfizer’s Greenstone service, which provides certification that a generic drug is validated by one of the major pharmaceuticals.
The company’s $1.5 billion valuation is courtesy of a new $200 million investment from existing investors led by General Catalyst and including FirstMark Capital, Torch, SignalFire, TQ Ventures, Initialized Capital, 3L and BoxGroup. New first-time investor The Chernin Group also participated. In all, Ro has raised $376 million since it launched in 2017.
“This new investment will further our mission to become every patient’s first call. We’ll continue to invest in our vertically-integrated healthcare ecosystem, from our Collaborative Care Center to our national pharmacy operating system. This is just the beginning of Ro’s patient-centered healthcare platform.”
It’s all part of the company’s mission to provide a point of entry into the healthcare system independent of insurance qualifications.
“Telehealth companies like Ro are using technology to address long-standing healthcare disparities that have been exacerbated by COVID-19,” said Dr. Joycelyn Elders, MD, Ro Medical Advisor and Former U.S. Surgeon General. “By empowering providers to leverage their skills as efficiently and effectively as possible, Ro delivers affordable, high-quality care regardless of a patient’s location, insurance status, or physical access to physicians and pharmacies.”
Ro’s new financing is one of several forays by tech investors into reshaping the healthcare system at a time when patient care has been severely disrupted by attempts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.
Digital medicine is assuming a central position in the healthcare world, with most consultations now occurring online. Reimbursement schemes for telemedicine have changed dramatically and investors see an opportunity to capitalize on these changes by aggressively backing the expansion plans of companies looking to bring digital healthcare directly to consumers.
That’s one of the reasons why Ro’s major competitor, Hims, is reported to be seeking access to public markets through its sale to a special purpose acquisition company for roughly $1 billion, according to Reuters.
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Borderlands 3 bridges the gap between citizen science and blockbuster games
The Borderlands series has long offered players a chaotic loot scramble of explosive cel-shaded cartoon violence and intricately tuned shooting that leaves anything that isn’t the fun part on the cutting room floor. It’s like the gaming equivalent of a very large, very rich dessert — and what if, by eating dessert, you could also make the world better? Imagine.
Borderlands 3 publisher 2K and developer Gearbox Software is elevating the series’ latest game to lofty new ideals with a new in-game experience called Borderlands Science, a crowdsourced citizen science project that will leverage the hit game’s massive player base to conduct actual scientific research. In this case that’s mapping the gut microbiome — one of the most interesting frontiers in biological science right now. Scientists believe that microbes in the gut could play a role in everything from autism to allergies, though many of those mechanics remain mysterious and difficult to study given the massive breadth of microbes in the gut and the limits of computational power.
For players, Borderlands Science appears in the game as a retro arcade cabinet that will pop up soon on Sanctuary III, the game’s central starship. The mini-game itself looks like a colorful, Tetris-like experience, and if players don’t read the fine print they might not even know that they’re mapping microbes. Assuming that Gearbox’s normal ethos is on display here it’s also likely fun and addictive, though we haven’t yet tried it. And of course, players won’t be expected to engage with the project for the good of science alone. The mini-game will offer players special rewards and Vault Hunter skins to collect — a smart and natural way to incentivize players in a game that’s all about the pursuit of loot.
The undertaking is a partnership between researchers at McGill University, the Microsetta Initiative at UC San Diego School of Medicine and Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS), a project connecting video games with vital scientific research.
“We see Borderlands Science as an opportunity to use the enormous popularity of Borderlands 3 to advance social good,” Gearbox Software co-founder Randy Pitchford said of the initiative, calling it a “new nexus between entertainment and health.”
Gaming-focused citizen science is emerging as a fascinating way to pair the gaming community’s natural strengths — sustained focus, patience for repetitive tasks, intensive time commitments — with the needs of scientific researchers. Two prominent examples are EyeWire, which invites players to help map the brain’s neural networks and Foldit, in which users solve puzzles to map complex protein structures believed to have a role in diseases like HIV and Alzheimer’s.
Apart from a handful of exceptions — like EVE Online players mapping exoplanets — these citizen science games are usually browser-based, with more of an edu-science vibe than anything resembling the flashy hit games that drive the industry. Borderlands Science bridges that gap, bringing citizen science into the lucrative, bustling world of triple-A games. And if the model pioneered here goes well, the project could be an excellent example for other publishers and developers looking to weave real scientific good into their games in the future.
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Mint founder Aaron Patzer launches Vital, an ER management tool that integrates with electronic health records
Aaron Patzer launched Mint to help consumers organize their finances. Now he’s raised $5.2 million from investors to launch Vital to bring that consumer-focused mindset to emergency rooms and hospitals to help them organize patient flow.
Patzer co-founded the company with his brother-in-law Justin Schrager, a doctor of emergency medicine at Emory University Hospital. The serial entrepreneur invested a million dollars and two years of peer-reviewed academic study and technical research and development to create Vital, according to a company statement.
Investors in the seed round include First Round Capital and DFJ, Bragiel Brothers, Meridian Street Capital, Refactor Capital and SV Angel. Alongside angel investors Vivek Garipalli, the chief executive of CloverHealth and Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, the founders of Flatiron Health, these investors are hoping that Patzer can repeat in the healthcare industry the magic he brought to financial services.
“The HITECH* Act was well-intentioned, but now hospitals rely on outdated, slow, and inefficient software – and nowhere is it more painful than in the emergency room,” said Patzer, in a statement. “Doctors and nurses often put more time into paperwork and data entry than patient care. Vital uses smart, easy tech to reverse that, cutting wait times in half, reducing provider burnout and saving hospitals millions of dollars.”
Vital isn’t so much replacing the current system of electronic health records as providing a software integration layer that makes those systems easier to use, according to the company.
It’s basically a two-sided application with a survey for incoming patients. An admitting nurse begins the record and as a next step a patient receives a text to add details like height, weight, recent surgeries, medications and allergies, just as they would on a paper form. Patients can also submit a photo of themselves and their insurance card to expedite the process.
The information is then fed back into a tracking board that doctors and nurses use to prioritize care. A triage nurse then reviews the data and affirms that it is correct by taking vital signs and assessing patients.
All of that data is fed into an algorithm that analyzes the available information to predict a course of treatment and help staff in the emergency room prioritize who needs care first.
Vital’s selling the service to emergency rooms with a starting sticker price of $10,000 per month.
“Vital successfully built software with a modern, no-training-required interface, while also meeting HIPAA compliance. It’s what people expect from consumer software, but rarely see in healthcare,” says First Round investor Josh Kopelman, who’s taking a seat on the company’s board of directors. “Turning massive amounts of complex and regulated data into clean, easy products is what Mint.com did for money, and we’re proud to back a solution that’ll do the same in life and death situations.”
In some ways, Vital looks like the patient-facing admissions side of a coin that companies like Qventus have raised tens of millions of dollars to solve at the systems level.
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