Reperio Health closed a $14 million round from existing investors this year, a pivot from a full series A, that will help drive the startup's move into telehealth.
Co-founder and CEO Travis Rush said he was in talks with new investors last year but as the funding environment grew challenging — for both startups and venture capitalists raising new funds — he opted to scale back and go back to existing investors.
“Beginning last year, we said let's not do an A, it’s not a good market. Let's focus on building product and pipeline and focus on getting prepared for the next phase of business we can launch in Q3,” he said.
Reperio started in 2020 and currently has a team of 24. It is a biometric testing and management company that aims to make it easier for people to monitor their health before a major medical condition develops. The company sends home screening kits to people that have FDA-approved devices that are connected to a proprietary app. Once a screening occurs, information goes to the app that can be seen by the user and their care provider.
Customers include health insurers, health care providers and corporate wellness programs.
At this point, the company has one distribution center in Portland for the kits, said Rush. Kits are sent all over the country using UPS for delivery and return. However, the team has used the last year to dial in its logistics and distribution model. It inked an agreement with Uber to deliver kits in certain cities.
The Uber partnership is expected to roll out in the middle of this year with kits being delivered in the Portland metro.
The plan is to open 10 distribution centers in cities across the country over the next two years, Rush said. A distribution center employs between five and 10 people depending on hours of operation.
The next big rollout for Reperio is a telehealth AI product. Once someone has completed their screenings with the items in the kit they will be prompted to connect with a nurse practitioner to do a consult, said Rush.
The nurse practitioner will have access to the results of the screenings and can work with the patient to come up with a plan.
The nurse practitioner, or other care professional, could be an employee of a health care provider that is a customer of Reperio or it could be a professional who works for Reperio as a 1099 contractor, Rush said. The team is building their network of nurse practitioners now.
Similar to how Uber and other on-demand companies operate, Reperio will have a distributed team and when a request comes in it will be directed to practitioners who are both licensed in the patient's jurisdiction and within their insurance, he said.
The company is building an AI tool that will help facilitate the conversation between the nurse practitioner and the patient.
“We think of ourselves as the tip of the spear,” said Rush. “We are not trying to position ourselves to be the patient advocate forever. We are trying to get engagement (with health care) so we can hand them to somebody who can take the relationship forward and improve health over time.”
The decision to push back raising a full Series A and landing new investors allowed the team to focus on this product build-out, Rush said.
The company is 4 years old but it only started shipping its kits commercially in October. The health care industry isn’t one that adopts products that “kind of work,” the way say, a business-to-business software company can iterate a product live with customers. He didn’t get into specifics but said the company has sent multiple thousands of screening kits to date.
“You have to nail it. We spent a long time making sure we have (the product) right,” he said.
Now when Rush goes back out to raise a Series A, he expects the startup’s more robust pipeline and product usage will make fundraising less challenging.
