Dina — the Chicago-based AI-powered platform that helps bridge the gap between health systems, payers and in-home care providers — is setting its sights on expansion.
It now has additional resources to accomplish that goal, too.
The company announced Monday that it has raised $7 million in Series A funding, with the round led by Philadelphia-based Osage Venture Partners. The new backing brings Dina’s total fundraising total to a little over $12 million since launching roughly five years ago.
Dina’s home care network currently spans 25 states, with Bayada Home Health Care and BrightStar Care among its major home-based care clients.
“The primary goal of the funding is to begin to scale out this vision around ‘care traffic control’ across the entire country,” Dina CEO Ashish Shah told Home Health Care News. “We’ve had pretty good growth last year from a revenue perspective. We largely did that without a strong sales and marketing investment on our side.”
Generally, Dina’s “care traffic control” model is all about creating a seamless information hub that lets health systems, payers and in-home care providers track patients as they move from one setting to the next.
It’s like having a digital command center that’s always at the ready, according to Shah.
“There’s a lot of momentum behind this whole vision of care traffic control,” Shah said. “It’s really putting a command center-like infrastructure inside of hospitals and health plans, allowing them to monitor the health and well-being of individuals the same way they would if they were in a hospital or ICU bed.”
That ability has only grown more important in the past year due to the COVID-19 virus, which has triggered a sweeping decentralization of health care. To create acute care capacity for the most vulnerable patients, for example, dozens of hospitals have launched innovative hospital-at-home programs.
“The sector is evolving to the point where, now, it’s the responsibility of health care organizations to be able to monitor people in their neighborhoods and in their homes,” Shah said. “We knew this was coming, but I think COVID has really accelerated it.”
For Dina, formerly known as “Prepared Health,” that decentralization in 2020 contributed to revenue growth of about 250%. It also led to new services from the technology company, such as digital screening tools to help providers manage employees showing COVID-19 symptoms.
Apart from expansion, Dina will also use its new funding to continue developing new digital care pathways to monitor and manage individuals with chronic conditions.
“This is a really exciting time for the business,” Shah said.
In addition to Osage Venture Partners, Dina’s $7 million Series A round included investment from existing investors, a roster that includes Chicago Ventures, Pritzker Group Venture Capital and several others.
The round also included investment from actual clients of Dina, Shah noted.
“We were impressed with Dina’s vision and approach to solving a very timely and massive problem of supporting people in their homes and communities,” Sean Dowling, partner at Osage Venture Partners, said in a press release. “We believe in the company’s seasoned leadership team, [which was] able to execute in a very difficult operating environment in the middle of the pandemic.”
Companies featured in this article:
