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Birth control delivery startup Nurx taps Clover Health’s Varsha Rao as CEO
Varsha Rao, Airbnb’s former head of global operations and, most recently, the chief operating officer at Clover Health, has joined Nurx as its chief executive officer.
Rao replaces Hans Gangeskar, Nurx’s co-founder and CEO since 2014, who will stay on as a board member.
Nurx, which sells birth control, PrEP, the once-daily pill that reduces the risk of getting HIV, and an HPV testing kit direct to consumer, has grown 250 percent in the last year, doubled its employee headcount and attracted 200,000 customers. Rao tells TechCrunch the startup realized they needed talent in the C-suite that had experienced this kind of growth.
“The company has made some really great progress in bringing on strong leaders and that’s one of the things that got me excited about joining,” Rao told TechCrunch. Nurx recently hired Jonathan Czaja, Stitch Fix’s former vice president of operations, as COO, and Dave Fong, who previously oversaw corporate pharmacy services at Safeway, as vice president of pharmacy.
Rao, for her part, joined Clover Health, a Medicare Advantage startup backed by Alphabet, in late 2017 after three years at Airbnb.
“After being at Airbnb, a really mission-driven company, I couldn’t go back to something that wasn’t equally or more so and healthcare really inspired me,” Rao said. “In terms of accessibility, I feel like [Nurx] is super important. We are really fortunate to live in a place where can access birth control and it can be more easily found but there are lots of parts of the country where physical access is challenging and costs can be a factor. To be able to break down barriers of access both physically and from an economic standpoint is hugely meaningful to me.”
Nurx, a graduate of Y Combinator, has raised about $42 million in venture capital funding from Kleiner Perkins, Union Square Ventures, Lowercase Capital and others. It launched in 2015 to facilitate women’s access to birth control across the U.S. with a HIPAA-compliant web platform and mobile application that delivers contraceptives directly to customers’ doorsteps.
Today, the telehealth startup is available to customers in 24 states and counts Chelsea Clinton as a board member.
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Public health startup Cityblock raises $65M Series B
Redpoint Ventures has led a $65 million Series B in Cityblock, a healthcare company focused on providing improved care to low-income neighborhoods.
The business launched roughly 18 months ago out of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, an urban innovation incubator known for projects like mobility data startup Coord, which itself raised a $5 million round in October.
“We’re a tech-enabled services company focused on caring for a population that has been traditionally overlooked by the innovation community and generally underserved across healthcare,” co-founder and chief executive officer Iyah Romm told TechCrunch. “We believe we can fundamentally redefine the way that health services are built across the country for low-income populations. These are populations that have never been prioritized.”
Romm has spent his entire career in the public health sector. Prior to joining Sidewalk Labs as an entrepreneur-in-residence in 2017, he spent one year as the chief transformation officer of the Commonwealth Care Alliance, a nonprofit medical care delivery organization.
Cityblock provides personalized medical and behavioral health and social services across a growing number of clinics on the East Coast. The company will use the investment to open additional clinics and continue the development of its core platform, Commons. The care delivery platform helps care workers collaborate and stay up to date on patients, with real-time hospital admission alerts to tools for tracking treatment progress.
Cityblock opened its first clinic, or “neighborhood hub,” in Brooklyn, New York after forging a partnership with EmblemHealth, a New York neighborhood health insurance business. They’ve since expanded to Connecticut via a partnership with ConnectiCare, a Connecticut insurance provider. Cityblock will open clinics in North Carolina later this year. Cityblock’s services come at no additional costs to members covered by partner insurance businesses.
The startup’s hope is to get these low-income demographics regular access to more affordable care. Preventative care, after all, is a whole lot cheaper than emergency room visits.
“People end up going to the ER when problems are really bad, for conditions that can be managed,” Redpoint partner and newly appointed Cityblock board member Elliot Geidt told TechCrunch. “There are 75 million people on Medicaid alone and a good portion of these people are living in the inner cities. It’s a problem that has a scope larger than most things that we see in the venture community. The big problem with this population is the existing healthcare system doesn’t work for them, it falls short on so many levels.”
New investors 8VC, Echo Health Ventures and StartUp Health also participated in the latest round, as did existing investors including Sidewalk Labs, Thrive Capital, Maverick Ventures, Town Hall Ventures and EmblemHealth.
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Zoom addresses CFO’s past workplace conduct ahead of IPO
Zoom, the only profitable unicorn in line to go public, priced its initial public offering at between $28 and $32 per share Monday morning. The video conferencing business plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “ZM.”
Zoom, valued at $1 billion in 2017, initially filed to go public in March. According to its amended IPO filing, the company will raise up to $348.1 million by selling 10.9 million Class A shares. The offering will grant Zoom a fully diluted market value of $8.7 billion, a more than 8x increase to its latest private market valuation.
Although the company has garnered praise for its stellar financials — Zoom posted $330 million in revenue in the year ending January 31, 2019, a remarkable 2x increase year-over-year, with a gross profit of $269.5 million — the road to IPO hasn’t been without hiccups.
The company’s founder and chief executive officer Eric Yuan last night published an open letter concerning the conduct of Zoom’s chief financial officer Kelly Steckelberg. According to the letter, Zoom was recently informed by an anonymous source that Steckelberg had an “undisclosed, consensual relationship” during her tenure at a previous employer.
Steckelberg was most recently the CEO of the online dating site Zoosk; before that, she was a senior director in consumer finance at Cisco . The letter does not specify where the relationship took place, when or with whom.
Losing a CFO mere days before an IPO would have been a major loss for Zoom. CFOs often become the face of the IPO, handling the grueling tasks associated with crafting an IPO prospectus, leading the roadshow and more, while also maintaining day-to-day financial operations.
Yuan writes that the Zoom’s board of directors conducted a full investigation into the matter and determined that Steckelberg would stay on as Zoom’s CFO: “Kelly expressed regret for what transpired at her former employer, took ownership for the situation, and made clear to us that she had learned valuable lessons from the experience,” he wrote.
“We appreciated Kelly’s openness and candor during this process,” he continued. “It is clear that this matter related only to circumstances at her former employer. During Kelly’s tenure at Zoom, she has been an incredible contributor, as well as a model steward of our culture, values, and high standards since joining the Company.”
We reached out to Zoosk for comment. Zoom declined to comment further.
Zoom, expected to make the final call on its IPO price next Wednesday, will likely price at the top of the range and see a clean pop on its first day on the markets given its clean track record and positive financials. The business was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, an early engineer at WebEx, which sold to Cisco for $3.2 billion in 2007. Before launching Zoom, he spent four years at Cisco as its vice president of engineering.
Zoom has raised $145 million to date from investors, including Emergence Capital, which owns a 12.2 percent pre-IPO stake; Sequoia Capital (11.1 percent pre-IPO stake); Digital Mobile Venture (8.5 percent), a fund affiliated with former Zoom board member Samuel Chen; and Bucantini Enterprises Limited (5.9 percent), a fund owned by Li Ka-shing, a Chinese billionaire and among the richest people in the world.
Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are leading its offering.
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