Photon Health
Why we just wrote our largest check in a decade into Photon Health
I first met Otto in the summer of 2021 and quickly had a feeling that we’d be working together for a very long time. During that first phone call, Otto was considering leaving his role as Director of Eng at Thirty Madison. I recall being impressed with his deep understanding of the inner workings of healthcare infrastructure, both from a technical and business perspective. He had an unwavering belief that he could help build the tools that would fundamentally change how the industry treats patients. I also knew that I wanted to be part of that, in whatever way I could support him.
Over the course of the next 6 months, we planned how Otto might strike out on his own. He had an idea that he couldn’t shake. After building e-prescribing integrations at Thirty Madison, he was convinced that there must be a better way for providers to route prescriptions, and for patients to have more visibility into and control over how and where their scripts get sent. This might sound like a simple idea, but the competition is a monopolistic incumbent that has built a tightly controlled pharmacy network over the past 20+ years. We need more truly ambitious ideas in healthcare, versus incremental progress, so I offered to lead his pre-seed round towards the end of 2021. And today, we are co-leading the company’s $9 million round with Flare Capital, which includes participation from Floating Point, GG1, Ritual Headwater and Scrub Capital.
Photon’s mission is simple: To enable patients to own their prescriptions.
Oddly enough, this is how it used to work back in the day when doctors wrote patients a physical script. Photon’s “unlock” involves giving providers the tools to do this, but purpose-built for a modern age. Surescripts has built something powerful — a strong network of providers and pharmacies to send scripts digitally, but their product is painful to integrate with. As a result, the most important participant is left out — the patient! Patients today have no idea what their drugs will cost, if they’re covered by their health plan, where they might be in-stock, and how long they’ll have to wait. This friction leads to embarrassingly low adherence rates for medications in the U.S. — a $300 billion a year problem — and increasingly poor health outcomes. I believe that what America needs is a new prescription network built from the ground up with patients at the center.
Photon has designed a product that I can only describe as beautifully simple for its users (patients, providers, pharmacies), but wildly ambitious and complex underneath the hood. In crypto, we call this the “mullet” — complex web3 on the back-end, but simple for users akin to web2 on the front-end. Photon is the mullet of prescription networks. I’m sure Otto will appreciate that analogy :-)
How does it actually work? Photon builds prescribing tools and APIs for providers to write and deliver digital scripts to their patients, which they receive via Photon. Patients can then choose to send their scripts to almost any pharmacy. This enables patients to actually own their prescriptions, while keeping a digital record and wallet for all of their historical medications.
Customers like Sesame, Summer Health and Blueberry love Photon because the product is extremely easy to integrate with (days versus months), and saves them hundreds of hours of time coordinating between their patients and pharmacies. Most importantly, with a digital script in hand, patients can now go shopping. While Photon enables patients to send scripts to almost any pharmacy in the U.S., pharmacies can choose to integrate with Photon directly in order to display pricing, inventory, and so on. In other words, Photon is bringing the e-commerce revolution to pharmacy.
This is the largest investment we’ve made to date at Notation. We believe that Otto, his co-founders Rado and Sam, and the rest of the exceptional team at Photon are on their way to building a generational company here in Brooklyn, NYC. Most importantly, I believe Photon Health has the opportunity to dramatically lower the cost of drugs in the US, and provide patients better transparency into and greater control over how they get their medication.
If you’d like to join us on this mission, get in touch with me personally. LFG.
