Pear Healthcare Playbook

Today, we’re excited to get to know Caitlin Reiche, Chief Commercial Officer at Zus Health — the first Chief Commercial Officer we’ve had on the podcast! Founded in 2020, Zus Health is a health data platform designed to accelerate healthcare data interoperability by providing easy-to-use patient data at the point of care. At Zus, Caitlin leads the commercial organization with the goal of growing the Zus builder community and is responsible for marketing, sales, partnerships and customer success. Prior to Zus, Caitlin was the Chief Operating Officer of Buoy Health and led Product Strategy at Patient Pop and Athenahealth. She graduated with a MS in Health Policy and Management from Harvard Chan School of Public Health and a BA in Psychology from Middlebury College. In 2021, Zus raised a $34M Series A financing led by Andreessen Horowitz and followed by F-Prime, Maverick, Rock Health, Oxeon and more. In this episode, Caitlin shares about her various roles in health tech, building community in the health tech space, the new era of Data as a Service companies, and what it means to be a Chief Commercial Officer at a quickly-growing startup.

This week, we’re super excited to get to know Erica Jain, CEO and Founder of Healthie, infrastructure for next generation digital health organizations that offer virtual-first care. Healthie’s API-first and fully brandable suite of solutions - EMR, coaching platform, scheduling software, and patient engagement - enable healthcare builders to launch and scale best-in-class experiences for their members and quickly scale a provider network. Currently, more than 2,000 organizations use Healthie’s services and organizations that use Healthie work with more than 2 million patients on the platform. Erica shares about Healthie’s early founding days in a business school classroom (staying focused on the prize, skipping a Brazil trip to pursue Healthie 24/7), building customer love and scaling to thousands of providers, valuing a pathway to profitability (before it was cool in 2022), and the power of collaboration with other tech players in the quickly-evolving healthcare infrastructure industry.

This week, we’re super excited to have Brandon Li, co-CEO and co-founder of Power, a platform to find promising new treatments through clinical trials. Power’s platform allows patients and providers to search every trial currently available in the U.S. It includes over 30,000 clinical trials and 100,000 researchers spanning 10,000 medical conditions. In Aug 2022, Power announced a $7M seed round led by Footwork and CRV. Brandon has spent a long time building and scaling consumer marketplace platforms to help people navigate traditionally opaque industries. Prior to founding Power, Brandon was the Head of Bizops at Thumbtack where he led growth strategy for the Home improvement marketplace. He landed at Thumbtack after Setter was acquired, where he was the GM of California. Before Setter, he spent time at McKinsey as an Engagement Manager focused on fast growth marketplace clients. Brandon has a background in high growth companies—Brandon is a serial entrepreneur, starting multiple companies across logistics, hometech and even suits! Another native guest from Canada, Brandon graduated from University of Toronto in Industrial Engineering. In this episode, we discuss how to navigate the idea maze, building from patient perspectives, and the emerging field of new pharma tech companies.

This week, we’re super excited to chat with Andrew Arruda, CEO, and Co-Founder of Flexpa, the fastest way for your digital health app to connect to new Patient Access APIs Founded in Jan 2021, Flexpa allows its customers to support linking data sources from Medicare, individual & family, and employer group plans from Unitedhealthcare, Anthem, Humana, and more. In this episode, we learn about Andrew’s unique journey into healthcare entrepreneurship as a confluence of the pandemic, love, near-death experience and friendship, the changing landscape of healthcare data regulations, and running a solid fundraising process. In June 2022, Flexpa announced an $8.5M seed round led by General Catalyst.

This week, we’re super excited to chat with Troy Bannister, CEO and Co-Founder of Particle Health, a user-friendly API platform shaping the new standard for healthcare data exchange. Founded in 2018, Particle Health’s comprehensive API uniquely combines data from 270 million plus patients’ medical records by aggregating and unifying healthcare records from thousands of sources. With this approach providers are able to easily obtain clinical data points without complex technology integrations, putting actionable patient health data at their fingertips. In this episode, we learn about Particle Health’s founding story, define healthcare data access and frameworks and the regulatory tailwinds for healthcare data access in the broader healthcare system. Is healthcare ready for the blockchain? We find out here! Particle Health raised $25M to accelerate their platform growth from Canvas Ventures. The financing brings the organization’s total capital raised to $39M.

This week, we’re super excited to have Karan Singh, COO and Co-Founder of Headspace Health, a leading provider of mental health and wellbeing solutions, touching the lives of over 100 million people in 190 countries As Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer, Karan drives clinical strategy, business development, research, and oversees daily operations for Ginger. He has worked across the healthcare ecosystem, from consulting with leading bio-pharma clients at ZS Associates to commercializing a health data analytics solution at Humedica. Karan holds his MBA from MIT Sloan and graduated with his Bachelors from UC Berkeley. Founded in 2011, Ginger provides personalized mental health support from behavioral health coaching, therapy, psychiatry, and self-care resources, all from the privacy of a smartphone. Last year, Headspace and Ginger merged to form Headspace Health, which is valued at $3B. Before Ginger was acquired, Ginger had raised $220M+ in funding. Now Headspace Health combines Ginger’s therapy, psychiatry and coaching offerings together with Headspace’s mindfulness and meditation services. Mindfulness by Headspace, human-to-human support by Ginger. Through their flagship Headspace brand, they have touched the lives of over 100 million people in 190 countries through mindfulness tools for managing stress, sleep, and focus. Headspace for Work and Ginger is distributed through over 3,500 enterprises today. In this episode, we talk about what it was like founding Ginger, and establishing new business models (one of the first digital health companies that sold to employers at scale), and the incredible journey a decade later touching over 100m lives globally. Karan is extremely humble and grounded and I think we can learn a lot from his leadership style and his perspectives and philosophy on founder work-life balance.

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.