Today, I’m ecstatic to announce that Curai Health has closed $27.5 million in Series B financing led by Gerald Chan and Stephen Bruso at Morningside Ventures and including our return backers from General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures. While we’ve been working quietly over the last few years to build Curai Health, we wanted to use today’s news to share a little bit more about what we do.
Over the last year, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought digital health into the spotlight. With in-person care limited, telehealth stepped onto the national scene to support an already overwhelmed system. Not only did we see numerous digital health IPOs, we also witnessed the birth of the first digital health Goliath after the Teladoc-Livongo merger.
Two of the biggest health-tech IPOs this year were One Medical and Oak Street Health (OSH). These two companies suggest healthcare’s future lies in improving patient experiences and access to primary care. But, One Medical (for the wealthy) and OSH (for the chronically ill) are services that are restricted to a select few. One of the trite sayings in healthcare is that “5 percent of the people represent 90 percent of the cost,” but that doesn’t address that a subset of today’s 95 percent will become tomorrow’s 5 percent because of chronic illnesses. Unless we can promote better health spans and prevent people from becoming polychronic and expensive, we won’t fix our nation’s health.
A few years ago, a simple blood glucose test showed I was pre-diabetic. With a BMI around 20 and only 23 years old, most Americans would never think to get screened. Five years later, by working with my physician on my diet and lifestyle, I am further from being a diabetic now than I was then. I am part of the 95 percent who avoided (eventually) becoming part of the 5 percent. Why shouldn’t this story be possible for every American?
The average American waits 2–3 weeks to see a new physician[1] and pays a $15–25 copay[2]. In a country with poor access to care, poor care experiences, and a chronic disease epidemic, we need to build solutions that address these issues structurally, instead of singularly addressing patients that are already sick and costly to the system — or those who can afford to keep themselves healthy.
While telehealth has been touted as the key to promoting more access, as it currently stands, it’s insufficient. Telehealth is still about recreating a one-off, brick-and-mortar visit in a digital setting. It does not lean into the advantages of the digital medium and, as a result, it falls short of reducing costs and improving quality as much as it could. Early e-commerce tried to move the physical store to a webpage, but just like AI has started to personalize and revolutionize the way we shop, the way we interface with healthcare needs to evolve too.
Imagine a future where every American has the world’s best doctor available to them — someone who knows them and can leverage the latest and greatest medical literature and science — and can help them manage and prevent chronic disease. Artificial intelligence, used in conjunction with primary care physicians, can deliver on this future: a service with the experience of One Medical and the advanced care model of an OSH at a price point that is affordable to everyone.
This isn’t some utopian, distant future. This is today.
The future I’m describing needs to include services that have the following traits:
All of this would ultimately help accomplish healthcare’s Triple Aim: improving the patient experience, improving health and decreasing cost. This is what we’ve built over the last 3 years at Curai Health — and we’re now ready to scale it. So, how does it work?
One of the biggest things we’ve learned over the past three years has been the value of workflows over technology. Technology and AI alone do not return value; they must be integrated into human processes. Plastering on “innovations” like triage chatbots on the front end and rules-based, “fairy dust” AI don’t get us to this promised land. Physician’s workflows and technology must continuously evolve together.
Curai Health is the world’s first truly learning healthcare system: a system that improves cost-effectiveness, care quality, and patient experience by cumulatively learning from every single patient we encounter. Today, our AI-powered primary care platform delivers care at 4–5x lower cost than other telemedicine services (and still decreasing). Most importantly, we do it in a way that patients love, giving them access anywhere, anytime in a convenient chat-based model. And, our primary care experience treats patients and their conditions longitudinally, allowing them to match with a single physician and have continuity of care. This means patients can work with a physician on a strategy to manage their chronic illnesses over time and to implement and revise it. Ultimately, this is a service that can expand primary care access in a way that reduces cost for everyone.
With the ability to deliver access to primary care at ultra low cost, we’re building a safety net for all who need healthcare access. Centered around the patient-physician relationship, we are building a service that addresses the range of issues that prevent people from seeking care. Many of our patients today have to navigate situations like not having enough money to pay for prescriptions; instead we have to help them find coupons or over-the-counter options. The job of a healthcare provider often requires dealing with those limitations and helping patients navigate their options. This list of issues can be long and complex. Curai Health is building this safety net and is looking to partner with employers with hourly workers, people on high-deductible health plans, and gig workers in order to bring a version of healthcare access they can afford. Instead of $300/mo for traditional insurance premiums, we can provide a real safety net that helps people live healthier and happier for one-tenth of the price (or less!).
This is the future we’re building toward: a truly integrated and affordable form of primary care that every person can use to live better and stay healthy; one that amplifies the limited number of physicians we have so that they can impact hundreds, or even thousands, of lives on a daily basis. Over time, we expect this system to grow to provide specialty knowledge, stay up to date with the latest scientific discoveries (see our work on COVID aware diagnosis), and integrate knowledge from precision medicine (genomics, microbiomics, proteomics, etc.) to improve the care we provide. When you have a data-enabled care-delivery system, the possibilities for providing better, more cost effective care are endless.
So today — armed with a new round of funding — we’re eager to keep on working, building, and innovating to bring this future ever closer. That’s the promise of Curai Health: to make primary care primary to every single person on the planet and build a society where people can live healthier. There still is much work ahead of us, but we feel we’re onto something special, and we’re excited to continue to build out this vision. If you’re interested in joining or partnering with us on this mission, please reach out!
