A New Era of Kidney Care: Our Investment in Strive Health

By: Elliot Geidt and Jacob Effron

We’re thrilled to announce that Redpoint is investing in Strive Health’s $140M Series B. Strive partners with payers and providers to enable value-based arrangements for kidney care.

Today, 37 million Americans have Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD), but 90% are unaware they have it. As patients’ kidneys become less effective at filtering blood, many health issues follow. A patient with CKD may wake up in a hospital totally unaware they had a kidney problem only to find they’ll need dialysis (artificial blood filtering) three times a week for the rest of their life. As that patient juggles many prescriptions and comorbidities, they’re unfortunately likely to continue to spend a lot of time in the hospital. Former Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar called dialysis, “one of the most burdensome, draining long-term treatments modern medicine has to offer.”

There are many ways to help delay CKD progression and mitigate complications. But less than half of later-stage CKD patients see a nephrologist (the quarterback for kidney care). Many aren’t educated on other treatment options.

This suboptimal care is expensive. As a country, we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on kidney care. But the space has seen little innovation — costs continue to rise while outcomes are not improving.

This dynamic is increasingly being recognized as a problem. The federal government recently introduced new value-based kidney care models through its Kidney Care Choices that incentivize the type of upstream care that will help kidney patients. Instead of paying for individual services, these models allow providers to take lump-sum payments to provide the care that best helps these patients. These providers can share in patient savings if quality outcomes are met. Private payers are becoming increasingly interested in these arrangements too as the 21st Century Cures Act increased the number of these patients on their plans. The industry’s shift to value-based care is exciting but requires new capabilities for providers and payers.

Enter Strive

Strive is a kidney care platform that partners with payers and providers to deliver the high-touch kidney care that helps make these value-based models work. Strive works closely with local primary care doctors and nephrologists to engage patients and coordinate their care. Strive’s team of nurse Kidney Heroes then adds additional clinical touchpoints. This more frequent and focused care helps Strive and its partners generate better patient outcomes and drive savings.

Strive’s technology platform underpins its ability to deliver this solution. Algorithms identify people who may have undiagnosed CKD early. The platform predicts condition progression and surfaces the appropriate next steps to Strive’s Kidney Hero team.

This is an important but complex business. Part of what drew us to Strive is the team’s tremendous combination of healthcare operations, clinical and technology experience. CEO Chris Riopelle and CRO Bob Badal came from the kidney care world and COO Aaron Molitor and CSO Will Stokes also came from the healthcare operations world. CMO Dr. Shika Pappoe was one of the first people to successfully implement a similar model at CareMore. CTO Masoud Nourmohammadi helped lead engineering at Health Catalyst. We feel confident in this experience team’s ability to improve outcomes for patients and providers alike.

Our Partnership

At Redpoint, we’re firm believers in the shift to value-based care. We’re particularly excited about businesses that partner with payers and others at risk to help manage a population. These business models are exciting because they allow companies to close care gaps with services that improve patient quality but aren’t normally compensated in fee-for-service systems. We’ve also seen the impact this can have through our investment at Cityblock, where the team is improving outcomes for Medicaid and dual eligible patients through a community-focused care model. The public market success of Oak Street Health, Cano and Caremax has shown that these companies can both have tremendous impact on patients and be great businesses.

We’re thrilled to be partnering with Chris and the Strive team on their important mission. We’re also excited to join NEA, CapitalG, Town Hall Ventures, Echo Health Ventures, Ascension Ventures and Oxeon on this journey.

If you’re equally excited about enabling this new era in kidney care, take a look at ways you can join the journey here.