Jun 29, 2021
Meet the underdogs taking on the $4,000,000,000,000 healthcare market
Bonus: Point Nine’s l̶e̶a̶k̶e̶d published 22-page NexHealth investment memo
Last week, NexHealth announced a $31 million Series B led by Josh Buckley. Congrats to Alamin, Waleed, and everyone at NexHealth on this achievement! And congrats to Josh for doubling-down on your investment in the company.
NexHealth is a patient experience management platform that helps doctors get more appointments, retain patients, and offer a better service by digitizing everything from booking and reminders to forms and billing. What’s more, NexHealth has built a universal API that makes it easy for developers to integrate healthcare data.
Just like Plaid lets developers connect their apps to people’s bank accounts using a single API, NexHealth allows developers to build healthcare apps without having to worry about integrations with dozens of different Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. Ultimately, NexHealth is going to become a three-sided marketplace that connects doctors, patients, and developers to accelerate healthcare innovation. You can read more about NexHealth’s “Secret 3-Step Master Plan to Cure Healthcare” in this excellent deep dive by Packy McCormick.
We led NexHealth’s seed round less than two years ago. Since then, the NexHealth team has:
- Hired a world-class leadership team
- Grown the team from six to over 100
- Launched the universal EHR API
- Gone from serving 1 million to 30 million patients
- Grown revenue by 400%.
If you’re a long-time reader of our blog, you’ll know that we’re always happy to give people a peek into the P9 kitchen, whether it’s publishing our investment thesis, explaining the rationale behind specific investments, sharing our values, or just b̶r̶a̶g̶g̶i̶n̶g about celebrating the success of the P9 Family.
We haven’t talked a lot about NexHealth publicly so far, but the Series B milestone is a good occasion to look back and talk about what motivated us to invest in the company two years ago.
But rather than trying to summarize our thinking, let me share our entire deal memo with y’all right here. We had to redact a few things for confidentiality reasons, but you’ll be able to read our memo almost in its entire m̶e̶s̶s̶i̶n̶e̶s̶s glory. The only other thing I’ve changed is adding our new logo to the doc. ;-)
As you’ll see, the decision to invest in NexHealth took a bit more Due Diligence than, say, Loom (which I’ve written about). That’s because it takes a little while to understand (at least a little bit) how healthcare works in the US, what a DSO is, and why you have to build integrations with 40 different on-premise EHR systems (some of which run on MS-DOS) to build a product with NexHealth’s feature set. In other words, it took a bit of work (which isn’t something Alamin thought VCs were capable of doing — sorry, insider joke 🤣).
But it didn’t take us too long to get bullish. Compared to the average P9 investment, NexHealth was already a bit further along, which made it easy to validate product-market fit. Talking to a few customers and looking at the early traction made it clear that NexHealth had come up with an effective cure that addresses chronic and acute pains in several large healthcare verticals (pun intended).
Funnily enough, NexHealth’s API product wasn’t even part of our original investment thesis because Alamin hadn’t included it in the pitch for the seed round.
“We wanted to stay focused and disciplined. Our dental SaaS product is the wedge to our entire strategy to accelerate healthcare innovation. So making sure it’s the best product in its category was important.
Plus I wasn’t sure of the timeline to releasing the API, and didn’t want to make your investment decision more complicated than it needed to be.”
Alamin Uddin, co-founder & CEO of NexHealth
About two weeks ago we published this video to celebrate the underdogs, the nerds, and the dark horses, who sometimes become unicorns. If they fall down eight times, they’ll stand up nine. They are a force of nature, and sometimes it can feel like they bend reality.
It’s hard to imagine founders who represent these characteristics more than Alamin Uddin and Waleed Asif, the co-founders of NexHealth. If you’d like to join them on their ride, from dark horse to unicorn and beyond, check out NexHealth’s open positions.
