Sprinter Health, a mobile healthcare provider, has raised $55 million in Series B funding to help the company expand its team and footprint, it announced Thursday.
Menlo Park, California-based Sprinter Health works with health plans and offers both in-home and virtual care. Its community-based health staff, called Sprinters, and remote nurse practitioners provide diagnostic screenings, vital checks, medication management support, wellness visits and care navigation. The Sprinters are W-2 employees and are certified as phlebotomists and trained with medical assistant and community health worker skills. They can also identify unmet social needs, such as fall risks or food insecurity, and connect patients with resources to address those needs.
“We’re focused primarily on reaching populations who are largely disconnected from the healthcare system: we specialize in engaging the unengaged,” said Max Cohen, CEO and co-founder of the company, in an email.
The $55 million Series B round was led by General Catalyst and included participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health, the Regents of the University of California, Google Ventures and Accel. In total, Sprinter Health has raised more than $125 million.
“We believe Sprinter Health is emerging as a category-defining company in home-based care,” said Holly Maloney, managing director of General Catalyst, in a statement. “They’ve built the technological infrastructure to make care both scalable and impactful for the people who need it most.”
The financing will help Sprinter Health grow its clinical, engineering, AI and operations teams, Cohen said. The company will also add new geographic regions to provide more coverage for its payer partners. It currently operates in 18 states and plans to expand to 22 by the end of the summer, according to the announcement. The Sprinters have also completed nearly 100,000 visits in people’s homes.
The financing comes at a point when accessing quality care is a challenge, and it’s oftentimes too expensive. This is what Sprinter Health hopes to address with its in-home and virtual care model, Cohen said.
“Getting basic tests and screenings for treatable diseases alone is increasingly difficult for people of all ages due to cost, distance, or an inability to figure out the complex healthcare system in this country. … If you expanded access under the status quo, expenses would increase even further, straining an already heavily-underwater system,” he said. “Private innovation capital allows the development of alternative models that can bend those cost curves, and our success on behalf of payer partners thus far begets further innovation and investment to continue scaling these solutions.”
There are several other companies that deliver in-home and virtual care, including DispatchHealth, which recently acquired Medically Home, another home care provider.
Picture: Feodora Chiosea, Getty Images
