TLDR: Fabric, backed by General Catalyst and GV, plots rapid growth
Key Points:
- Fabric, previously known as Florence, has rapidly grown and acquired two other companies to expand its capabilities in automating clinical and administrative work in healthcare.
- The company provides a telemedicine platform for health systems, working with 70 health systems and payers, and focusing on improving patient and provider experience.
General Catalyst Salesforce GV (formerly Google Ventures) Thrive Capital Fabric, formerly known as Florence, officially launched out of stealth about a year ago and has rapidly built out its tech that automates clinical and administrative work in healthcare. The startup has already notched two acquisitions in the past 10 months to broaden its capabilities. In April, it picked up Zipnosis from Bright Health in an all-cash deal to expand its asynchronous virtual care capabilities, and, in January, the company bought conversational AI assistant Gyant, another all-cash deal, to expand its “digital front door” for patients. The company provides a telemedicine platform for health systems and has built a suite of products, from patient intake to self-scheduling to provider documentation tools, to help streamline workflows for in-person and virtual patient visits using conversational AI. The technology improves both the provider and patient experience, according to executives, while also improving operational efficiency. The company says it’s now working with 70 health systems and payers, and its customers include Luminis Health, OSF HealthCare, MUSC Health and Intermountain. “We’ve had tremendous growth. We went from really zero to 70 health systems over the last year, and we scaled from zero to past eight figures in annual recurring revenue,” Fabric CEO and founder Aniq Rahman said in an interview. “We’ve now had about 5 million patients being treated through our telemedicine platform.” The company is aiming for triple-digit revenue growth year over year, he noted. Fabric’s care enablement system was designed to improve patient access while driving clinical and operational efficiency from symptom onset through virtual and in-person treatment and post-visit engagement. Rahman said the company’s technology addresses clinical capacity problems with its patient care and management software that focuses on three main areas—engagement, in-person care and virtual care. The acquisition of Gyant enables Fabric to serve as a patient entry point for other services. “We are now engaging with patients in everything from finding care and finding a provider to scheduling a provider, searching symptoms and asking billing questions. We’ve had about 13 million digital interactions, which is also helping reduce contact center volume,” Rahman said. “We’re trying to tackle a lot of seemingly disparate things, but they all connect because they are all part of the patient journey.” Related Florence picks up $20M backed by Salesforce, GV to scale up clinical workflow, patient intake software Fabric also is attracting big-name investors who see the potential for AI-powered care enablement tech. The company recently pocketed $60 million in a series A round backed by General Catalyst. Thrive Capital, GV (Google Ventures), Salesforce Ventures, Vast Ventures, Box Group and Atento Capital also backed the round. A year ago, the company picked up $20 million in seed funding backed by many of those same investors. Fabric plans to use its series A funds to expand its team, advance product development, build out its AI capabilities and invest in more acquisitions, with a particular focus on AI firms. “We’re going to continue being opportunistic when it comes to finding strategic M&A opportunities. In this market, it’s great to have a war chest to just give us more optionality to control our own destiny, a lot more than many other companies in this current environment,” Rahman said. “We’re going to continue looking for things that can help ‘unclog’ some of the bottlenecks in hospitals.” Investors are sinking cash into care enablement companies as another startup, Memora Health, also backed by General Catalyst, raised $30 million back in April. Memora developed an AI-enabled platform that helps providers manage complex care needs and digitizes clinical and administrative workflows. “Our team has what we think is a unique view of the challenges in healthcare across our health system partnerships, and in order to solve the largest problems, we believe you have to address one of the biggest constraints: clinical capacity,” said Holly Maloney, managing director at General Catalyst, in a statement. “Aniq and Aiden [Feng] are repeat entrepreneurs that we admire, and believe they have the right end-to-end care system, network and relationships in place to uniquely address these challenges, and we are excited to join them as they grow.” Healthcare has a lot of friction, especially within clinical workflow and patient intake. Rahman, previously president of analytics company Moat, which was sold to Oracle in 2017 for $850 million, says he recognized an opportunity to use technology to tackle these challenges. The company aims to create a modern system for managing patient capacity that eliminates hassle for both clinicians and patients. It started with emergency departments. Its ER mobile app experience enables patients to start their nursing intake while they’re sitting in the waiting room to improve triage and get patients through their ER visit faster, Rahman said. Related Startup Florence acquires Zipnosis from Bright Health to build out telehealth services Like many healthcare startup founders, Rahman said he was inspired to launch Florence based on a personal experience with the healthcare system. A few years ago, Rahman’s father had a heart attack and spent time in the hospital. “He’s fine now, but I just spent a lot of time in the hospital seeing the heroes that saved his life and the work that the front-line workers, nursing staff did day in and day out. And at the same time, I observed the inherent sort of chaos and dysfunction of a system where technology has not really been brought to the forefront,” Rahman said in an interview last year. “I think there is an opportunity on the enterprise side and there are also consumer opportunities as well, which kind of dovetails with my prior builder experience from my private businesses.” With its two acquisitions and through internal product development, the company has built out its products to automate workflows from patients’ symptom onset to post-visit follow-up, according to Rahman. The company’s team includes physicians and engineers from leading health systems and technology companies, and Fabric has built clinical protocols that map …
