Participated · Series B · May 2024

SamaCare provides a cloud-based workflow automation platform that helps medical practices streamline specialty drug prior authorization, patient enrollment, and benefit verification. It also delivers premium services and data analytics to pharmaceutical brands to improve access to therapy. The company works with pharmaceutical manufacturers, providers, payors, and other stakeholders. SamaCare serves retina, oncology, neurology, and rheumatology practices that together account for over $20 billion in annual specialty drug spend. Led by CEO and founder Syam Palakurthy, the company says it continues to grow quickly. The company intends to use new funding to accelerate product development of its one-stop patient access platform. SamaCare offers a portal that lets medical practices submit, track, and manage prior authorizations for specialty and physician-administered medications across payers and drugs. The platform replaces disconnected spreadsheets, unstructured EMR notes, and insurer-specific portals, automating status tracking so staff do not need to manually check approvals. It is free for medical practices and monetizes via premium features sold to pharmaceutical manufacturers, including region-specific data and patient-enrollment tools such as nurse support, adherence programs, and financial assistance. Operational metrics cited include over 2,300 prescribers on the platform, a 43% reduction in time spent on prior authorization, a 22% increase in administrative denials, a 70% reduction in time-to-treatment for pharmaceutical customers, and a 20% increase in first-time approval rates for drugs. The company says it will use the funding to expand practice penetration across existing and new specialties, ramp up customer acquisition and pharmaceutical support, and hire executives to lead provider growth, customer success, operations, product, and engineering. SamaCare’s stated mission is to remove avoidable administrative obstacles so patients receive therapy based on clinical need rather than administrative or financial burdens.

Led · Series A · Jan 2022

Kiddo (Good Parents Inc.) builds a B2B care coordination platform combining a proprietary wristband wearable, a parent app, parental coaching and telehealth to manage pediatric chronic conditions. The system monitors heart rate, temperature, SpO2, motion and perspiration and integrates environmental metrics like local air quality, weather and humidity to develop individualized profiles and generate alerts and care tips. It targets children aged two to 15 and specifically focuses on asthma, heart disease, autism and diabetes. Kiddo says it is working with 70,000 children and plans to expand to about 200,000 in the next few years. The company positions itself as a B2B provider partnering with hospitals, health systems and benefits providers, and has partnerships with seven health systems and organizations including UHC Optum and PC Health. Kiddo is investing in clinical validation, has unpublished internal data claiming more than 50% improved treatment adherence and a twofold reduction in unnecessary ER visits, and is aiming for Class I FDA certification (it has not received marketing clearance). With the new funding it plans to grow its sales and product development teams and expand into additional pediatric specialties such as oncology and orthopedics over the next two years. GoodParents develops Kiddo, a children’s wearable sold in three age-specific devices (4–6, 6–8, 8–10) that tracks temperature, perspiration, heart rate, fat percentage, muscle mass, and motion. Sensor data is relayed to a parental dashboard that converts health, activity, sleep, and emotional wellbeing into scores and supports manual logging such as food. The product includes gamification to engage kids — gesture-based multiplayer games and point systems for health goals redeemable for rewards — while the company emphasizes health and stress management as the central use case. GoodParents is a one-year-old startup that has partnered with Samsung and consulted advisers at the Foods for Health Institute at UC Davis in product development. The company plans a direct-to-consumer launch starting with a Kickstarter in January 2017 and also intends to sell via health plans and employers; it has already secured a collaboration with a top-10 health insurer and another B2B customer. Financially, GoodParents has raised $2 million in seed capital to advance product development and go-to-market plans.