We are proud to announce that we have raised $75 million in our Series B funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Growth Fund and Viking Global Investors, with follow-on funding from AlleyCorp, SV Angel’s Growth Fund, and other leading investors. The round is comprised of $55 million in equity capital and an anticipated $20 million in a line of credit. This round brings Pearl’s total funding to date to more than $100M.
With the Medicare trust fund on the verge of bankruptcy,1 an aging population,2 and healthcare costs steadily increasing,3 the US healthcare system is approaching a financial breaking point. Meanwhile, primary care is overburdened,4 undervalued,5 and inefficiently used,6 and chronic conditions are rising in prevalence and severity,7 resulting in poor health outcomes that are often avoidable and exacerbating existing strains on the system.
Increasing Risk Liquidity Through Strategic Growth
Over the past year, more than 800 primary care providers across the country partnered with Pearl to align payments with patient health and leverage emerging data and technology to achieve better outcomes more efficiently. We’re thrilled to welcome this new cohort of PCPs, who are committed to delivering value for their patients and for the healthcare system.
As we expand our network of enabled providers who can cooperate in risk-based arrangements, this will increasingly enable us to invite more payers to our model, who will, in turn, offer more risk-based models for our providers. This consolidation will empower providers increasingly to commit to this new healthcare system, and Pearl’s increased scope and insight will afford greater success to these partnerships.
While we started with traditional Medicare, we believe there is value in aligning the entirety of a practice’s panel to a better incentives structure. Our next stop will be working to expand our footprint to forward-thinking Medicare Advantage plans, so our provider partners can treat all seniors in a proactive, data-driven way. And be rewarded for it.
Our network growth creates a virtuous cycle: improving liquidity in the market for healthcare risk management, breathing oxygen into a financially broken system, and pushing toward efficiency and savings instead of volume and expenditures.
Generating Insights to Automate Value
In 2022, we launched the first version of the Pearl Platform: technology purpose-built to enable PCPs and clinical staff with insights that help them proactively manage Medicare patient panels with less work, deliver higher-quality care at a lower cost, and drive continuous improvement.
The platform is powered by data science models that distill complex information from across the entire healthcare system into what’s most important to enable proactive, whole patient care. We have taken a principled approach to developing and evolving the Pearl Platform, prioritizing ease-of-use, minimizing the administrative load required from users, and surfacing simple, actionable insights.
Through the Pearl Platform, providers and clinical staff can more easily understand their performance and identify the patients most likely to need attention across a patient panel. They can also explore detailed patient-level information with data across providers and facilities (e.g. hospital admissions, new diagnoses, new medications) to get a holistic, longitudinal view across a patient’s care journey.
We believe the best way to empower providers to manage healthcare risk is to ensure they have unparalleled visibility into their patients’ healthcare utilization and needs. The Pearl Platform equips providers and clinical staff with timely admit, discharge, and transfer (ADT) alerts, so they have the information they need to effectively coordinate care following acute or post-acute events and prevent costly, avoidable hospital readmissions.
Finally, turnkey reporting gives primary care organizations strategic visibility into the most important determinants of success in value-based models and helps identify where they could deliver better care at a lower cost — without hours spent in spreadsheets, checklists, or reports on quality measures.
White Paper
Signal-Action Framework & Urgency Score
In this document, you’ll learn about the algorithm and signals that power the insights surfaced within the Pearl Platform.
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Signal-Action Framework & Urgency Score
Creating a Marketplace for Efficient Risk Management
We believe that physician enablement technology with a focus on primary care is critical to improve outcomes across patient panels and lower costs across our healthcare system; however, PCPs will of course continue to require support from specialists for those patient cases beyond the purview of general medicine.
In recent years we have seen a proliferation of mission-driven companies founded to manage distinct cohorts of patients based on the clinical disease burdens they exhibit, bringing to bear novel care models and eschewing traditional healthcare network constructs. Pearl sees this new landscape of Specialty Risk Partners as an opportunity to obviate the problems presented by most local market dynamics and move toward better aligned virtual care teams supported by targeted local assets.
We have already laid the groundwork with early Specialty Risk Partners that have demonstrated high-quality, efficient outcomes via appropriate care models for populations most prevalent amongst our provider partners’ panels. As time goes on, we will continue to develop integrated tooling to better manage at-risk populations, while aligning these partners with PCPs through both the Pearl Platform and financial incentives.
Building Our Team and Values-Based Culture
At Pearl, we have always believed that our team — and, above all, our culture — will be the ultimate reason for our success or failure. We have created and will continue to iterate on company values that serve as our north star through difficult decisions and growth.
As we enter the next phase of our evolution as a company, we’re confident that we are building the right team and culture to meet the moment.
Our Board of Directors
Vineeta Agarwala, MD
Board Member
Vineeta Agarwala, MD, PhD, is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where she leads investments for the firm’s bio fund across therapeutics, diagnostics, and digital health, with a focus on companies that are leveraging unique datasets to improve drug development and patient care delivery. She also serves on the board of BigHat Biosciences.
Prior to joining a16z, Vineeta has held many different roles in the healthcare space: as a physician taking care of patients; as an operator at tech-driven healthcare companies; and most recently as a venture investor on the GV (Google Ventures) life sciences team, focused on biotech companies with a data-driven approach. Previously, she was an early data scientist at Kyruus; a management consultant for biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical device clients at McKinsey & Co; and a Director of Product Management at Flatiron Health, where she led the company’s partnership with Foundation Medicine to integrate real-world clinical and genomic data into national-scale database products to accelerate drug development and research in oncology. She has collaborated with academic researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Broad Institute, where she did graduate work in computational biology and human genetics.
Vineeta holds a B.S. in biophysics from Stanford University, and MD and PhD degrees from Harvard Medical School / MIT. She completed her clinical residency at Stanford, and is board certified in internal medicine. Vineeta continues to see patients at Stanford as an adjunct clinical professor in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health.
Vineeta Agarwala, MD
Board Member
a16z
Jeffrey De Flavio, MD
Executive Chairman
Jeffrey De Flavio, MD
Executive Chairman
ALLEYCORP | Groups
Michael Kopko
Board Member, CEO
Michael Kopko
Board Member, CEO
OSCAR | BRIDGEWATER
Scott Kupor
Board Member
Scott Kupor is an investing partner focused on growth-stage companies building in the bio and healthcare industries, manages the firm’s investor relations team, and is responsible for the firm’s growth initiatives.
Scott was the first employee at Andreessen Horowitz and managed the firm’s growth from $300 million in AUM to more than $30 billion. Prior to joining the firm, Scott worked as vice president and general manager of software-as-a-service at Hewlett Packard. Before that, he held numerous executive management positions at Opsware, including senior vice president of global field operations, vice president of financial planning and vice president of corporate development. Prior to Opsware, Scott represented software companies in both financing and mergers and acquisitions transactions at Credit Suisse First Boston and Lehman Brothers.
Scott is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It, and serves on the boards of Cedar, Headway, Foursquare, Labster, Ultima, and SnapLogic. He also served as chairman of the board for the National Venture Capital Association.
Scott graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in public policy with honors and distinction. He also holds a law degree with distinction from Stanford University and is a member of the State Bar of California.
Scott Kupor
Board Member
A16Z
Kevin Ryan
Board Member
Kevin Ryan
Board Member
ALLEYCORP
Our Management Team
Gabriel Drapos
Chief Operating Officer
Gabriel is Chief Operating Officer at Pearl Health. He was previously a leader on the Product team at Centivo. While there, he led market launches in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida and Michigan, in partnership with 14 regional health systems.
Prior to Centivo, Gabriel was an early employee at Oscar Health Insurance, where he served in a number of roles including Director of Product Operations, Chief of Staff, Interim Head of Marketing and in a Special Projects role on the Data Analytics team.
Gabriel received his A.B. in Philosophy from Harvard University. He wrote his honors thesis under the advisement of T.M. Scanlon, in which he argued for an alternative moral framework for justifying informed consent in clinical medicine.
Gabriel Drapos
Chief Operating Officer
Centivo | Oscar
Jennifer Rabiner
Chief Product Officer
Jennifer Rabiner
Chief Product Officer
Hint Health | Athenahealth
Matt Solnit
Chief Technology Officer
Matt Solnit
Chief Technology Officer
Akamai
Joseph Cianflone
Executive Vice President, Finance and Strategy
Joseph Cianflone
Executive Vice President, Finance and Strategy
PSP Investments | Black Diamond Asset Management
Steven Duque
Chief Growth Officer
Steven Duque is Chief Growth Officer at Pearl Health. He was previously Vice President of Marketing at Catalant Technologies, where he partnered with cross-functional company leaders to design and execute Catalant’s go-to-market strategy and messaging, build brand awareness through thought leadership and category creation, and enable sales teams and product-led growth to efficiently generate more than 40% year-over-year revenue growth during his tenure. Prior to Catalant, Steven served as Vice President of Product and Marketing at Happie, in addition to serving in various marketing, sales, and evangelism leadership roles at Intuit and Bullhorn, among others.
Steven received his A.B. in Philosophy (primary concentration) and Sociology (secondary field) from Harvard University.
Steven Duque
Chief Growth Officer
Catalant | Happie
Jon Goldin
Chief Legal Officer
Jonathan E. Goldin serves as Pearl’s General Counsel. He came to Pearl from a global consulting firm, where he was the Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel of its financial advisory business. Before working in-house, Jonathan practiced law at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. He focused on representing corporations, directors and officers in litigation relating to mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, securities law issues, regulatory inquiries and other complex civil matters. Jonathan began his legal career as a law clerk, first in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and then in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Jonathan is active in professional organizations, such as the New York City Bar Association and the Association of Corporate Counsel. His public service has included membership on the New York City Water Board (and its Joint Audit Committee with the New York City Water Finance Authority), the Commercial Division Advisory Council of the New York Court System, the New York Chief Judge’s Committee on Non-Lawyers and the Justice Gap and the Pro Bono Advisory Committee of the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest.
Jonathan holds an A.B. from Harvard College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School.
Jon Goldin
Chief Legal Officer
Wachtell Lipton | Teneo
Our team of provider-enablement, risk-bearing, and technology experts are thoughtfully building a values-based team to democratize access to healthcare risk, align incentives with patient outcomes to deliver higher-quality care at a lower cost, and to make our healthcare system more sustainable.
Interested in learning more? We are hiring across functions, including engineering, product, sales, marketing, customer success, and finance. Check out opportunities on our Careers Page.
- Peter G. Peterson Foundation, “Budget Basics: Medicare. Medicare Hospital Insurance Fund Surpluses / Deficits (% of GDP, 1970-2100).”
- U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates and Projections. Cited in U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration of Community Living, “2020 Profile of Older Americans,” May 2021.
- Statista, “U.S. Health Expenditure as Percent of GDP from 1960 to 2021.”
- University of Chicago, “Primary care doctors would need more than 24 hours in a day to provide recommended care,” August 2022.
- PCPs are under-compensated, compared both to other verticals of the healthcare system (among the lowest ranked specialties by annual compensation) and to the value they bring to that system (the average PCP generally earns $266k, but influences ~$10M in downstream healthcare costs). Sources: Farzad Mostashari, Darshak Sanghavi, Mark McClellan, “Health Reform and Physician-Led Accountable Care: The Paradox of Primary Care Physician Leadership,” JAMA, May 2014. Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), “New MGMA research finds physician compensation on the rise,” Cision PR Newswire, May 2019.
- Healthcare spending per capita in the US is about twice that of comparable countries; yet, US healthcare consumers engage in routine care less often. Higher (and more efficient) utilization of primary care services can decrease systemic costs overall by mitigating risks before chronic conditions develop or acute events occur. Sources: Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, “Health consumption expenditures per capita, U.S. dollars, PPP adjusted, 2020 or nearest year.” OECD Health Statistics, “Number of doctor consultations per person (2017 or most recent available),” 2019.
- Wullianallur Raghupathi and Viju Raghupathi, “An Empirical Study of Chronic Diseases in the United States: A Visual Analytics Approach to Public Health,” 2018.