These Under 30 Founders Just Raised $15 Million To Make It Easier To Get A Doctor’s Appointment

NexHealth announced Tuesday that it raised that sum in a Series A funding round, led by Mino Games founder-turned-angel investor Josh Buckley. Other investors include Behance founder Scott Belsky, AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant and Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra. The company has now raised a total of $19.75 million in venture capital.

The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2017 by Alamin Uddin, 26, and Waleed Asif, 28, who’d met while both were undergrads at the City College of New York. Uddin was considering whether to go to medical school when he took a receptionist job at a doctor’s office in the Bronx. Annoyed by the tedium of the role, he began to wonder if it might be possible to automate the process of handling simple calls and booking appointments. He was ultimately frustrated in the attempt, though, when he realized that the custom apps he was trying to build weren’t able to get data from patients’ electronic health records, a requirement to do what he needed. “I discovered this was not just a problem for me, but a problem for everyone else,” he recalls.

That frustration led him to join forces with Asif, and the two built the first iteration of NexHeath’s product, an online appointment system. The pair raised a $1.5 million seed round in October 2016 and were soon marketing its product to small and medium sized dentist’s and doctor’s offices, which had been largely ignored by bigger players, who mostly target large healthcare systems. A key aspect that distinguished its products from competitors is that it is interoperable with many electronic health record vendors – avoiding the problem that initially frustrated Uddin in that Bronx doctor’s office. 

That software interoperability enabled the company to automate the appointment process, eliminating the need for receptionists to make extra calls to patients to verify times of day and improving the efficiency of small practices. As the company grew, it took on $3.25 million more in seed capital in September 2019. It also expanded its offerings: in addition to appointment bookings, it also offers secure online and text messaging. 

“For a lot of telehealth startups, the challenge is distribution and NexHealth has really cracked the nut there.”

After the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the company also accelerated a key offering: telemedicine. Though a new service since the pandemic, it caught on very quickly with NexHealth’s customers – nearly half of its customers are using the new capability, says Uddin. 

Telemedicine may be a crowded market already, but investor Josh Buckley thinks that the company has a key advantage. “I’m bullish on NexHealth because of the distribution angle,” he says. “For a lot of telehealth startups, the challenge is distribution and NexHealth has really cracked the nut there.”

Three months ago, the company launched yet another new service: payment processing. This is a separate offering from the messaging, appointment booking, telemedicine software, which providers can subscribe to as a bundled services at a flat monthly rate of $550. But it does offer its customers some key advantages by making it easy for patients to pay their bills by sending both notifications of payments owed and the ability to make payments using its software. “It goes from a 30 day process of a doctor getting paid by a patient to a 2 to 3 day process,” says Uddin. 

Building software that’s both interoperable with electronic health records and is continually adding new services has enabled NexHealth to grow quickly. The company already has nearly 25,000 customers, split between dental and medical practices. The company says its revenues have grown nearly 230% since the summer of 2019. But there’s plenty more room – the company estimates that there’s about 750,000 small and medium sized practices in the United States and Canada, representing an addressable market of around $5 billion. And the payment processing market? That’s bigger still, Uddin adds.

With the new round of capital, NexHealth intends to grow yet another part of its business: APIs. Developers who work for companies that produce medical apps and software are keen to be able to reduce friction and provide more reason for customers to use their services. This makes NexHealth an ideal platform, says Uddin. 

The company’s first API customer was online toothbrush company Quip, which additionally sells a dental insurance product. The company wanted to make it easier for its app users to find dentists in that insurance product’s network. Enter NexHealth’s API, which has that layer of interoperability with health records in its software stack. Quip was able to use that API to guide its users to those dentists.

Looking forward to the future, Uddin’s ambition for NexHealth is to become the primary software platform in the market. “Our vision is to be the Microsoft of the healthcare world,” he says. “We want you as a developer, as a doctor’s office, as a patient, to use our products or services whether you know it or not.”