Nurx has $22.5 million in new money, a path to profitability and new treatments for migraines on the way

Published August 11, 2020

As the COVID-19 epidemic spread across the U.S. earlier this year, Nurx, like most other digital providers of healthcare and prescription services, saw a huge spike in demand.

Now, with $22.5 million in new financing and a surging annual run rate that could see the company hit $150 million in revenue, the company is emerging as the largest digital practice for women’s health.

“We saw this tremendous surge in need for our contraception and sensitive health services,” says Nurx chief executive Varsha Rao .

The growth hasn’t come without controversy. Only last year, a New York Times article pointed to corner cutting at the startup, which boasts Chelsea Clinton as an investor and advisor.

Undeterred, Rao said the company has now seen tremendous acceleration in all areas of its business. It’s now providing care to more than 300,000 patients on a monthly basis, boasts that $150 million run rate and has new investors like Comcast Ventures, Trustbridge and Wittington Ventures — the investment arm of one of the largest pharmacy chains in Canada, Shoppers Drug Mart.

The new $22.5 million is an extension on the company’s previous $32 million round and will take the company to profitability by 2021, according to Rao.

And while birth control and contraception are still the largest areas of the company’s business, Nurx is growing its range of services, seeing adoption of its testing for sexually transmitted infections including HPV and herpes and a new treatment area for migraines.

That focus on sexual health and what the company calls sensitive health is different from trying to be a primary care provider, says Rao. “Our real focus right now is on our core demographic who are women between the ages of 20 and 40 and really focusing on their needs,” she says. “That’s why migraines make a lot of sense. It’s not exclusively hormone-related, but it often is… One-in-four women experience migraines and they’re largely from hormonal changes… This is a condition we’re well-positioned to address.”

Another way that Nurx differentiates itself from competitors like Hims and Ro, which provide women’s health and contraceptive prescriptions as well, is through its ability to take insurance. “It’s actually pretty challenging to build the system to actually offer insurance,” says Rao. “And yet, we don’t think you can be a true healthcare company if you don’t accept insurance.”

Birth control delivery startup Nurx taps Clover Health’s Varsha Rao as CEO

Published April 17, 2019

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.

Birth control delivery startup Nurx now offers an at-home HPV testing kit

Nurx raises $36 million and adds Chelsea Clinton to its board of directors

Published July 11, 2018

Telemedicine startup Nurx recently closed a $36 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins. As part of the investment, Kleiner Perkins General Partner Noah Knauf is joining the startup’s board of directors, along with Chelsea Clinton .

With this new funding, CEO and co-founder Hans Gangeskar told TechCrunch that the startup plans to scale its clinical teams, pharmacies and geographic reach in the coming year.

“We have a new site in Miami where we have a team of nurses being on-boarded, [we’re] building out our engineering and design teams and really just [working to] increase the pace of everything that we’re doing,” Gangeskar said.

The startup launched in 2014 with the goal to make reliable access to contraceptives as easy as opening your web browser. After plugging your information into its online app, users are connected with physicians, given a prescription and Nurx prepares their product for delivery.

Since its launch, this California-based startup now operates in 17 states, and has expanded its products to include not only contraceptives (such as pills, patches, injectables and products like Nuva Ring) but the anti-HIV medication PrEP as well. Gangeskar says the company is also preparing to launch an at-home lab kit soon for HIV testing.

For Gangeskar, creating affordable access to contraceptives is a first step to changing how patients interact and receive medication from their physicians.

“Birth control is one of the fundamental functions of any health care system [so] for us its a natural place to start,” said Gangeskar.

To help advance its plans to redefine this space, Gangeskar says Nurx is excited to welcome public health veteran Chelsea Clinton to its board.

“Her experience in public health and global health from the Clinton Global Initiative has been really valuable, [particularly learning about] rolling out preventative services in large scales, because really that’s the potential of our platform — [to reach] populations that can’t be reached by the conventional medical system.”

While Washington looks to make cuts to American’s healthcare access, startups like Nurx offer a fresh perspective on this critical space.