Better Life Partners, 2018
MBA Founder: Steve Kelly, Dartmouth Tuck School of Business
Total Raised: $38.3 million
Latest Funding Round: $26.5M Series B Aug 2023
Better Life Partners is a virtual health provider in the Northeast U.S. offering mental health, addiction treatment, care coordination, and other services to public health and other care providers. It specializes in creating personalized care plans to vulnerable populations who may be reluctant to seek care in traditional spaces.
Kelly, MBA ’18, co-founded the company with Dartmouth Tuck adjunct professor Dr. Adam Groff, MD. The two bonded over discussions of the opioid crisis and how it affected families.
The company works to provide same-day treatment for opioid patients by staffing healthcare professionals in church basements, homeless shelters, and other spaces where care is needed but largely unavailable. The model helps overcome patient stigma and other barriers to seeking care in a medical office.
“We go to where the people are,” Kelly recently told Tuck Today. “We are reaching a population that either can’t get to a clinic or is stigmatized as soon as they walk inside the door.”
Tuck’s entrepreneurial ecosystem helped build and launch the company, Kelly says. That includes finding investors in Tuck’s extensive alumni network.
Better Life Partners raised $26.5 million in equity and options funding in its second funding round in August this year. It previously raised $11.8 million in seed and Series A funding between 2018 and 2021. Venture capital backers include F-Prime Capital Partners and .406 Ventures.
Hyro, 2018
MBA Founder: Israel Krush, Rom Cohen, Cornell Tech
Total Raised: $37.2 million
Latest Funding Round: $10.5M Series A May 2021
Hyro is an adaptive communications platform that automates workflows and conversations for organizations. It focuses on healthcare, a sector where patients can struggle finding answers and next steps to care.
Krusch co-founded the platform as an MBA at Cornell Tech. In May, it closed a $20 million series B funding round led by Macquarie Capital while also attracting new investors.
During the pandemic, it released a free COVID-19 Assistant to answer questions and screen symptoms, a tool which could be deployed within 48 hours. Dozens of U.S. health systems adopted the tool and many became paying customers, Krush told Pulse 2.0 in August.
Topography Health, 2020
MBA Founder: Mac Parish, Stanford GSB
Total Raised: $27.5 million
Latest Funding Round: $21.5 Series A Jan 2022
Topography Health is a platform to encourage community physicians to engage in clinical trials. Now, trials are dominated by a few, slow-moving studies at large academic hospitals, usually involving affluent patients. Topography seeks to democratize trials by completing administrative tasks and removing barriers, giving access to a wider, typically underserved patient population.
It closed a 21.6 million Series A round in January 2022, led by Bain with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.
“When Alexander Saint-Amand, Andrew Kirchner, and I decided to start Topography Health, we were completely stumped by the state of clinical trials in the US. Why was it so hard for people in need to find trials, and why did so few physicians offer the means for patients to identify and benefit from potentially life-saving treatments?” Parish wrote on his Linked-in last year.
“After 18 months, a pandemic, an incredible team, and a product (and roadmap!), we could not be more excited to help to change this paradigm.”
Pipo Saude, 2019
MBA Founder: Thiago Torres, INSEAD
Total Raised: $26.02 million
Latest Funding Round: $20M Series A
Pipo Saude is a platform that sells and manages healthcare benefits to Brazilian companies, from healthcare plans to fitness benefits. It raised $26.02 million over three rounds, the latest a $20 million Series A round in July 2021 led by Thrive Capital.
Torres, MBA ‘19, founded the company with Manoela Mitchell (CEO) and Vinicius Correa (CTO). Torres serves as COO.
NEXT PAGE: MBA Healthcare Startups Chronus Health, Glyphic Biotechnologies, Twentyeight Health, and Cardiosense
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