On Monday, K Health announced the close of a $50 million equity funding round. The financing round brought the startup’s total fundraising amount to $380 million — and propelled the company to a $900 million valuation.
The New York City-based startup, which was founded in 2016, uses AI to educate patients about their symptoms and connect them to primary care.
“Primary care is broken,” declared Ran Shaul, K’s co-founder and chief product officer. “In many markets, if you wake up in the morning and want to see your physician, you’re going to need to wait a long time. Sometimes it’s even easier to see a specialist than to see your own primary care provider. And this is the primary care provider who needs to be your advocate, needs to know many things about you, who you need to have a long term relationship with, who needs to manage your chronic conditions — it just doesn’t work.”
K Health partnered with health systems, including Cedars-Sinai, to develop a longitudinal care program that involves both in-person and virtual primary care. This hybrid care delivery model involves K’s primary care chat function, which uses AI to suggest diagnoses for patients who enter their symptoms into the startup’s chat function, taking into account their medical history and demographic information
The platform sifts through the data of about 2,000 people per day, Shaul said. K then suggests a medical condition and connects patients to available physicians or nurses if necessary.
The company seeks to increase Americans’ access to primary care by offering telehealth appointments for urgent and chronic care conditions, as well as providing an option for patients without insurance to chat with a clinician for less than a copay.
K’s platform is available 24/7 and in 48 states, Shaul added.
He is confident that his startup can stand out from its competitors, such as Amazon’s One Medical.
“A big advantage for us is we believe that our AI is providing us unit economics that are much more favorable for our type of business. We can do more with less. Building clinics, maintaining clinics, charging membership fees — all of that stuff they do is not in our business. We believe that is where the key competitive advantage is — we can actually build something that can scale and be profitable,” Shaul explained.
With its new infusion of $50 million, K is going to continue sharpening its AI, both of the generative and predictive side of things, as well as begin preparing for a potential IPO down the road, he said.
As retailers like Walmart and VillageMD back down from playing the primary care game, K is in it for the long haul, Shaul added.
Photo: hirun, Getty Images
