Patient-matching service Verato raises $12.5m of series B funding
Patient-matching provider and start-up Verato has closed a $12.5m series B venture capital round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Columbia Capital. Both investment firms had previously contributed to the start-up’s $12.5m series A round in January 2015. Verato recently announced partnerships with five healthcare organisations as customers, tripling its yearly revenue and making 75% of the company’s business healthcare-oriented. The start-up helps healthcare, hospitality, retail and government organisations create master indexes of patients as customers of healthcare services. The company will use the new funds to double its tech, engineering and delivery teams, and enlarge its sales force.

Verato, a startup provider of what its CEO called “patient matching as a service,” disclosed Monday that it has closed on a $12.5 million round of Series B venture capital. Bessemer Venture Partners and Columbia Capital co-led the investment round.

Both investors had participated in Verato’s Series A, another $12.5 million round that closed in January 2015.

McLean, Virginia-based Verato also said Monday that it has tripled its annual recurring revenue by landing five healthcare organizations as new customers. The company did not name any of the organizations, but said the group includes a large national insurance company, a multibillion-dollar integrated health system and three health information exchanges.

CEO Mark LaRow said that 75 percent of the company’s business now comes from healthcare. While the technology helps create or augment master patient indexes at health systems, payers and HIEs, Verato also works with the hospitality and retail industries, as well as with the federal government.

“Every company has a database of people,” LaRow said. “It’s a pervasive problem across industries.”

In healthcare, the lack of a workable master patient index has long been a hurdle to interoperability, particularly without any sort of consistent national patient identifiers. Now, according to LaRow, it has become a competitive issue.

“More and more hospitals find themselves competing for patients based on their ability to share information,” he said. If a patient logs into an organization’s portal and, for example, sees records from all five doctors that person goes to, he or she would have more confidence in that health system than one that provided just two or three of the five records, LaRow explained.

Verato has big plans for the new cash infusion. “We will double our technology team, engineering team and delivery team and staff up our sales force,” LaRow said.

Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services