Pear Healthcare Playbook

This week, we’re super excited to chat with Kristina Saffran, CEO and Co-Founder of Equip Health, a leading virtual, evidence-based eating disorder treatment provider. Founded in 2019, Equip Health helps families recover from eating disorders at home. Equip provides virtual, evidence-based care provided by a dedicated five-person team that empowers families to help their loved one achieve lasting recovery. Kristina has dedicated her life to ensuring people have access to quality and affordable treatment. Before starting Equip, Kristina was CEO and Co-Founder of Project HEAL which she started at age 15. Project HEAL is a foundation that provides funding for eating disorder treatment grants to those without financial access and has a network of 100,000 people across 40 chapters worldwide.  She is a Mental Health Advisory Board Member at Verily Life Sciences and previously worked as a research coordinator at the Stanford University of Medicine after graduating from Harvard in Psychology. In February 2022, Equip announced that they raised a $58 Million Series B Funding Round led by The Chernin Group, joined by Tiger Global, General Catalyst, Stripes Group and more, to scale access to their treatment. In this episode, we talk about Kristina’s experience with eating disorders, her journey through nonprofits and academia to eventually founding Equip, and how she has scaled a tech-enabled services business profitably in all 50 states. 

This week, we’re super excited to have AmirAli Talasaz, co-CEO and co-founder of Guardant Health, a leading precision oncology company focused on helping conquer cancer globally. Founded in 2011, Guardant Health is focused on helping conquer cancer through the use of its proprietary blood-based tests, vast data sets and advanced analytics.  Guardant’s solutions include treatment selection, recurrence detection and early detection of cancer. The Guardant Health oncology platform leverages capabilities to drive commercial adoption, improve patient clinical outcomes and lower healthcare costs across all stages of the cancer care continuum. Through multiple rounds of private financing, Guardant Health raised over $500 million from investors including Sequoia, Khosla, Lightspeed, OrbiMed, and Softbank, and Pear! and Guardant completed a successful IPO in October 2018.

This week, we’re super excited to have Corbin Petro, CEO and Co-Founder of Eleanor Health. In this episode, we cover how Eleanor Health utilizes a value-based care model for health plan's most vulnerable and complex populations. We dive into different levels of risk and discuss tradeoffs for a startup at different stages. Founded in 2019, Eleanor Health provides evidence-based, whole-person care specializing in addressing the unique complexities of individuals and populations with substance use disorders and mental health needs. Eleanor Health leverages proprietary technology and data-driven insights, compassionate teams, and value-based payment to deliver superior clinical and financial outcomes. Eleanor recently announced last month that they raised a $50M Series C Round led by General Catalyst with participation from Warburg Pincus, Townhall Ventures, Northpond Ventures and Rethink Impact.

This week, we’re super excited to have Tara Viswanathan, CEO and Co-founder of Rupa Health, a healthcare company building the digital platform for the next evolution of medicine: root cause medicine. Founded in 2020, Rupa is revolutionizing medicine by enabling access to root cause medicine, where practitioners aim to identify and solve the true underlying causes of an illness. A root cause approach looks at a person's health holistically and employs advanced comprehensive diagnostics to understand everything from genetics to diet, stress, cortisol levels, the microbiome, and more. Rupa solves the most difficult part of practicing root cause medicine: lab work. Prior to founding Rupa, Tara was on the early team at Parsley Health working on product and operations after earning her bachelor's degree from the Wharton School and master’s in management science at Stanford University. On top of this, she's also a certified nutrition and wellness consultant! In March this year, Rupa announced a $20 million Series A round led by Bessemer with participation from First Round Capital, Lachy Groom, and more.

This week, we’re super excited to have Carolyn Witte, CEO and Co-Founder of Tia.  Founded in 2017 by Carolyn Witte and Felicity Yost, Tia is blending in-person and virtual care services. Tia’s “Whole Woman, Whole Life” care model fuses gynecology, primary care, mental health and evidence-based wellness services to treat women comprehensively — a stark shift from fragmented care for different "body parts'' or life stages. Prior to founding Tia, Carolyn was a Team Lead at Google Creative Labs, developing and growing Google’s core mobile consumer products, Search, Maps and Translate. In September 2021, Tia raised $100M in Series B Round led by Lone Pine Capital.

This week, we’re super excited to have Rachel Blank, CEO and Co-Founder at Allara. Founded in August 2020 and based in New York, Allara wants to help women better manage chronic conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS. It currently affects one in 10 women of childbearing age. Prior to founding Allara, Rachel was the Director of Strategy at Ro, where she launched their women's health brand, Rory. Rachel earned her MBA from Harvard Business School.

This week, we’re super excited to have Priyanka Jain, CEO and Co-Founder at Evvy. Founded in 2020, Evvy is on a mission to radically reinvent how we understand and treat the female body, starting with the vaginal microbiome. Prior to Evvy, Priyanka was the Head of Product at Pymetrics for four years and earned her Bachelor’s degree at Stanford University. In July 2021, Evvy raised a $5M seed round led by General Catalyst. Evvy was founded to serve the unmet needs of 30% of women in the US. The vaginal microbiome is one of those aforementioned signals as the cause of some of the most common conditions in women — yeast infections, recurrent UTIs, bacterial vaginosis, aerobic vaginitis, cytolytic vaginosis, etc. Not only are these conditions highly prevalent, affecting over 30% of women every single year, but these conditions are extremely debilitating to physical, emotional, and mental health and highly stigmatized. Vaginal infections have incredibly outdated diagnostics and treatments, as well as one of the highest recurrence rates in medicine

This week, we’re super excited to have Elizabeth Burstein, CEO and Co-Founder at Neura Health. Founded in 2020, Neura Health is a virtual neurology clinic with a mission to improve the access and quality of neurological care: increase convenience, improve outcomes, and lower costs. Neura Health's platform connects patients to neurologists, with built in neurology-specific symptom monitoring and condition-specific diagnostic tests.  The company’s first app focus is on chronic headache and migraine. Prior to founding Neura Health, Liz was the Head of Product at Maven Clinic and Director of Product at ZocDoc. Neura Health recently announced that they raised a $2.2M seed round with Pear VC, Norwest Venture Partners, Global Founders Capital, Index Ventures, and Next Play Ventures.

In this episode, we’re super excited to have Lucia Huang, CEO and Co-Founder at Osmind, the operating system for neuropsychiatry. Founded in 2020, Osmind provides software and data for precision mental health to help the 22M Americans with treatment-resistant mental health conditions. Prior to founding Osmind, Lucia was the Director of Operations and Finance at Verge Genomics, a next generation neuroscience drug discovery company. In July 2021, Osmind raised a $15M Series A led by Future Ventures! We’re a proud early supporter at Pear VC as well.

In this episode, we’re excited to learn from Vik Bakhru, Chief Health Officer at Circulo Health. Circulo is building the Medicaid insurance company of the future to provide tech-enabled, world-class care to the nation’s most underserved populations. Vik is also currently a member of the clinical advisory board at Bright Health and a practicing Staff Physician at UCSF Medical Center. Prior to Circulo, Vik was the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer at SameSky Health (formerly Consejosano) for almost 4.5 years and COO of First Opinion. In February 2021, Circulo launched out of stealth at $50M led by Drive Capital, General Catalyst, Oak HC/FT and SVB Capital.