In a big fundraising day for Chicago health tech, SwervePay and First Stop Health announced funding rounds of $10 million and $2.1 million, respectively, this morning.
, which offers a payment solution that lets patients pay their medical bills via text message, raised its $10 million in a Series B round led by Garland Capital Group to support its growth and expansion. The company plans to attract new talent and expand its partner network.
“We’re excited and privileged to bring this all-star team of investors on board at SwervePay,” said co-founder and CEO Jaeme Adams (pictured right) in a statement. “With the business acumen around healthcare, payments, and growing large enterprises, this investment is more validation that our innovations will continue to blaze the path we created in changing how patients pay for healthcare.”
SwervePay raised a $1.6 series A round of funding in 2014 after being self-funded since its 2010 launch.
“Solutions that focus on presenting the right data, at the right time, to the right audience to facilitate a payment is essential for the healthcare industry,” said Gary Holdren, founder of Garland Capital Group in a statement. “I consistently hear from healthcare leaders their need for a product like this. I have yet to see any other software payment offering like SwervePay. They are truly a leader in this space.”
Chicago-based telemedicine provider
also announced a round of funding this morning — this one a seed round of $2.1 million led by existing investors. The round was joined by several new investors including a number of technology entrepreneurs and a European investment group.
This latest round brings First Stop Health’s total funding to $5.6 million.
After tripling sales and building a proprietary physician network over the course of 2015, the company plans to use the new funding to further enhance the network, expand sales and marketing and further build on its underlying technology.
"Telemedicine can play a key role in transforming what is currently a less than patient-centric healthcare experience into a delightful one,” said CEO Patrick Spain in a statement. “As patients are being asked to bear an ever increasing burden of the cost of healthcare, a high utilization telemedicine plan can limit the financial impact for both the patient and the employer and be a wonderful patient experience at the same time.”
Many see telemedicine as holding great promise both for practical and financial reasons. It can make the process of seeing a doctor less burdensome for patients who live far from the closest medical practice, and help reduce cost and strain for elderly and disabled patients who would otherwise need to travel by ambulance to get routine checkups. Telemedicine also has the potential to reduce the spread of particularly contagious infectious disease.
However, telemedicine providers have long struggled to gain mainstream adoption of their technology. Citing utilization rates of between four and six times typical industry rates, First Stop Health claims to have cracked the code as the “only provider in the telemedicine industry delivering a hard dollar ROI to its clients.”
Image via Shutterstock.
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