Today, we’re very excited to announce our $11.5m Series A financing led by FirstMark Capital, and joined by existing investors such as Lerer Hippeau, Project A Ventures, and Atlantic Labs. We’re equally excited to welcome some amazing entrepreneurs who participated in the round: Zac Weinberg and Nat Turner, founders of Flatiron Health; Vivek Garipalli, founder and CEO of Clover Health; and Clark Valberg, CEO and founder of InVision.
It all started a few years ago in a small sublet in Berlin. There, my co-founder Simon and I set out to fix the healthcare system by using technology to connect doctors and patients in a meaningful way. Because we realized that healthcare was highly fragmented, inefficient, and lagging at least three or four years behind other industries. Its most essential component — communication — was a siloed and disconnected mess.
So we founded Klara, which has grown into a US-based company headquartered in New York City with a team of 30 amazing people and the best investors we could ever wish for.
We’re currently witnessing a Copernican Revolution in healthcare, a shift from a provider-centric to a patient-centric universe. But like all revolutions, change comes with a price, and as patient demands grow, the extreme inefficiencies of the system only become more glaring. Billions of dollars are lost each year due to the siloed storage of data, miscommunication, or simply a lack of functioning communication at all. Medical staff and patients alike are suffering from an antiquated, broken setup.
At Klara, we want to solve all that. We’re improving the quality of care while radically reducing the cost of it through a central messaging platform that securely and intuitively connects providers, medical professionals, and patients. They can now seamlessly communicate, share, and exchange information.
This means we’re saving medical staff hours and hours each day with time-efficient messaging that’s deeply integrated with their day-to-day workflows, phone systems, and websites, allowing them to effectively collaborate. And ultimately, we’re making patients happier: they now have access to a channel that eliminates all the stress of archaic telecommunications, so they can easily navigate their healthcare.
We’ve already become an operating system for all things related to patient communication for thousands of providers connecting them with hundreds of thousands of patients. And this is just the beginning. Klara will eventually become the true connecting fabric the healthcare system so desperately needs.
Now, we’re excited to welcome Amish Jani, Partner at FirstMark, to our board, and we’re more than happy to have him. His deep understanding of SaaS, passion for reshaping the frontend of healthcare, and experience helping grow incredibly successful companies like InVision and Shopify, will prove essential as we take our next leap forward.
So, what’s next?
We’re now in the best possible position with not only funds, but also the right people to build something truly valuable and lasting. So, we’re driving forwards with our product roadmap — we’re working on automating numerous manual workflows, which medical teams would have previously been forced to repeat over and over again. By building out our API, we’re better integrating with EHRs and enabling 3rd party apps to live inside the Klara messaging UI. By doing so, we’re facilitating more complex workflows such as scheduling, payments, e-signatures, intake, and much more, all through a single, unified interface.
We’re also enhancing our cross-practice network capabilities so that we can connect more practices with each other, and enable more collaborations across healthcare organizations. And we’re confident that, thanks to our amazing team, customers, advisors, and investors, we’ll continue to deliver unprecedented value to practices, medical organizations, and more importantly, to patients. Because that’s what really matters.
Simon and I haven’t forgotten why we first set out on this journey. We’re still determined to fix the healthcare system and now, more than ever before, confident we can do just that, one message at a time.
If you’re looking to streamline patient communication and increase operational efficiency, please reach out to us here: sales@klara.com
