Today, we’re excited to announce our new $15M financing round led by Google’s AI-focused venture fund Gradient Ventures and leading healthcare investor Frist Cressey Ventures. With this funding, we will be able to accelerate our mission, drive the next generation of healthcare, and continue to make a siloed industry more connected and collaborative for practices, pharmacies and patients alike. For the full announcement, please see the press release and our feature in TechCrunch. We wanted to use this space to talk about our experience so far and the next phase of growth for Klara.
How we’ve evolved
We founded Klara with a mission to transform how patients and providers communicate, as that is the single most important element of the doctor-patient relationship. Over the past years, we’ve helped thousands of medical teams nationwide to simplify patient communication, optimize provider workflows, and offer high-quality virtual care. These solutions have become vital for healthcare practitioners — especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has fundamentally changed how medical care is organized.
What initially started as a doctor-patient messaging solution has now become a leading patient engagement platform for healthcare providers. With Klara, practice staff can also more easily communicate with each other and collaborate across care networks. Time-consuming workflows such as appointment reminders, insurance collection, intake, and follow-up engagement are now fully digitized and automated. And, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we quickly launched a best-in-class and seamlessly integrated telemedicine solution that physicians can use for virtual visits long-term.
The next chapter
This new funding from Google’s AI fund Gradient Ventures, Frist Cressey Ventures, and existing Klara investors such as Firstmark Capital, Project A Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and Stage 2 Capital will allow us to further transform the patient-provider experience — and we will do that by growing our team, enhancing our core product, and building out AI-driven automation.
Here are areas we will focus on:
- Deeper connections with market-leading EHR and PM systems to drive fully-integrated and automated scheduling, patient intake, payments, balance collection, and more. We’ll continue to create smart and integrated workflows that accomplish their goals due to our relentless approach to intuitive design and our expertise in effective patient communication end-to-end, across the patient journey.
- Streamlined communication across practices, pharmacies, and labs. While innovation in healthcare has come a long way, there is still an alarming amount of fragmentation in the healthcare space. We want to change that by making Klara the place where providers across the healthcare continuum come together to collaborate on patient care.
- Continue to focus on our core mission to transform communication for providers and patients. Our platform enables communication to be unified in one place so providers can see every past conversation with a patient, have internal discussions with members of the care team, and even hold a video visit with a patient, without ever leaving Klara. We want to continue improving on the work we’ve done here to ensure providers can communicate even more effectively, without sacrificing the simplicity of design that makes our product great. This will lead to improved outcomes for patients and profitability for practices.
Understanding the Critical Need for Change
Our investors understand the critical need for change in healthcare — and we are thrilled to have their support as we continue building an all-in-one solution for medical teams everywhere.
“The team at Klara has built an incredible product that delights doctors, patients, and operators within practices,” Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Google’s Gradient Ventures, said in today’s press release. “While the telemedicine market expands more rapidly than ever before, we’re excited to partner with Klara as they develop automated and intelligent solutions for the next generation of healthcare.”
“The traditional physician practice must transform to improve communication and engagement with their patients — especially in a post-COVID world. Existing practice technology infrastructure is inadequate. Klara’s seamless solution modernizes the practice infrastructure without disrupting workflows.” said Navid Farzad from Frist Cressey Ventures. “We’re looking forward to being part of this next phase of growth for Klara as they continue to transform the patient experience.”
And... Thank you!
But much bigger and much more important than any funding round is realizing what really brought us here and has given us the chance to start, continue and accelerate our mission. THANK YOU to our incredible team for relentlessly pushing for building better, selling smarter, and making our customers more successful — you rock! THANK YOU to our customers, for trusting us with your most sensitive asset, your patient experience, for believing in us, for never stopping to give us honest feedback, helping us solve millions of small and thousands of big problems, and for getting the word out that we are the future.
To those of you who have been part of the journey with us so far, thank you for your commitment, your energy and your time. We wouldn't be here today without you. Ultimately, you are what made us successful, and we can't give you enough appreciation.
Today, we are proud of all that we’ve accomplished, but there is still so much more work to be done. There are many healthcare organizations and patients who are still struggling to communicate through outdated methods that impact patient care. It’s a long road ahead and we have a big mission, but we’re excited to dive into this next chapter with all of you. We’re going to invest every dollar in helping healthcare organizations create a world-class experience for their patients and improve healthcare as we know it.
