New York-based Vesta Healthcare provides medical partnership and supervision to those that already have a presence in the home — home care agencies, family caregivers and others.

“The way that our business model works is that we partner with groups that go into the home,” Vesta Healthcare CEO Randy Klein told Home Health Care News. “They refer patients to us, for whom they’re seeking additional clinical support for. We provide support, supervision, oversight of them, and help them stay medically stable and avoid unnecessary hospitalizations. Then we participate in health plan networks as essentially an internal medicine group.”

Currently, Vesta Healthcare focuses on older adults with chronic conditions and functional limitations, typically supported by formal or informal home care. The company serves over 50,000 people.

The equity round was led by RA Capital Management, with participation from Oak HC/FT, Chrysalis Ventures, CareCentrix/Walgreens, Nationwide, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Lux Capital, Generator Ventures, Deerfield Management and others.

Meanwhile, the debt financing came from Horizon Technology Finance Corporation, an affiliate of Monroe Capital.

This latest round of funding will be earmarked to accelerate the growth of Vesta Healthcare.

“We’re going to use the primary equity to support the growth of the business, in particular, supporting our expansion of new geographies and new partners that are referring patients to us,” Klein said.

Klein originally started Vesta Healthcare because he felt caregivers were largely overlooked.

“Home care aides and family caregivers are the most important overlooked aspect of the delivery system,” he said. “They spend more time and have more access than almost any other provider. The idea was that if we could engage with home carriers and caregivers, we could unlock a very powerful resource within the delivery system that could, ultimately, help patients, improve caregiving and create triple A savings and outcomes for the system at large.”

With Vesta Healthcare, the goal was to bring together home care and clinical care.

Klein believes that the company’s biggest growth barrier is the speed at which it can onboard support.

“Part of that growth is making sure that we have the ability to support the referral volume that we have — investing in staff, systems, technologies, processes,” he said.

However, the company has been experiencing positive momentum.

“We’re in the fortunate position that, as people increasingly understand what we do, they’re like, ‘Oh, that would actually be really helpful,’” Klein said. “We’re getting a pretty good referral volume. I’m very pleased to say that we’re getting pretty good partnership interest. Now we have to scale it up.”

Scaling up means becoming a nationally capable partner for providers, health plans and others, Klein noted.

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K2 HealthVentures and other existing investors – such as Rubicon Founders, Valtruis, HLM Capital and Oak HC/FT – also participated in the round.

HarmonyCares will use the money to expand to additional geographies and develop new technology to “drive clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction at scale.” The Troy, Michigan-based company is already in 15 states and cares for over 70,000 patients under Medicare Advantage (MA) plans and Medicare Accountable Care Organization (ACO) programs.

It provides in-home primary care, as well as home health care, hospice care, palliative care, radiology and laboratory services. Its physician-led care teams include nurse care managers, social workers, pharmacists and 24-7 on-call support.

“There is an urgent need to expand access to longitudinal care, particularly as many patients across the U.S. are already struggling to get the care they need,” HarmonyCares CEO Matthew Chance said in a statement. “This latest investment enables us to double-down on our commitment to expand access to value-based care for patients with complex clinical and social needs and who often have limited access to care, resources, or even family nearby.”

General Catalyst has invested in a wide range of health care companies over the years, including Homeward Health, another home-based primary care provider.

“Health care today lacks a platform at scale that comprehensively delivers services to our most complex patients in the convenience of their home,” General Catalyst Managing Director Chris Bischoff said in a statement. “HarmonyCares is well on this journey and actively manages our most vulnerable patients in an economic model where incentives are aligned. We are excited to welcome Matt and the broader HarmonyCares team to our Health Assurance ecosystem.”

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The company works with the likes of BrightStar Care, Home Instead, Visiting Angels, Griswold and Always Best Care, according to its website. It leverages audio technology to detect abnormal events in a senior’s home.

In 2022, the company raised $14 million in Series A funding. The most recent funding round was led by Zeev Ventures and Insight Partners. Existing investors Entrée Capital, Flint Capital, Jibe Ventures and Secret Chord Ventures also participated in the round.

“When our customers say that Sensi is more than just technology, that there is a heart behind it, we know we are on the right path,” Sensi.AI Co-Founder and CEO Romi Gubes said in a statement. “We are dedicated to ensuring every senior can age with dignity in the comfort of their own home, the place they love most. This funding from renowned investors will help us continue to innovate our product and scale our go-to-market strategy, bringing our vision to life.”

The dementia care expert Teepa Snow is an advisory board member at Sensi.AI. Her Positive Approach to Care program previously partnered with the company.

“We’re very excited because Sensi is this sort of audio awareness system. It has that level of awareness — what’s happening in that environment 24/7. It’s not really recording every second, it’s just noticing things,” Snow previously told Home Health Care News. “When it picks up on something that’s care related, or distress related or good care related, or an anomaly, then it records about 10 seconds of an interaction right around that. Then it creates a signal to the dashboard that says this has happened, and it could be an indication that something good or not good is going on.”

Sensi.AI is based in Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel, and also has offices in the United States. In addition to the aforementioned providers, it supports “over 80% of the largest home care providers in the U.S.,” according to the company.

Its technology extracts hundreds of insights on a senior’s well being, and that information is sent back to a clinical care team that includes social workers, occupational therapists, geriatric clinicians and nurses.

With staffing shortages persisting in home care, providers have recognized emerging technologies as one way to augment care staff in the home.

“When I came across Sensi, I immediately recognized the magnitude of the problem they were solving. It requires more than simply applying AI technology,” Oren Zeev, founding partner at Zeev Ventures, said in a statement. “I am confident that Sensi’s advanced audio AI technology along with their talented team will spearhead a transformation in the care ecosystem unlike anything seen before.”

Home-based care providers and AI

For years, home-based care provider leaders expressed their belief that AI solutions could ease pain points in the space.

Both home health and home care providers saw the opportunities to supplement staffing, or even to recruit or retain better. Home health providers also saw the opportunity to ease the documentation burden on clinicians, increasing efficiency, operations and retention rates.

Now, those solutions are actually beginning to be realized. Home care providers are partnering with platforms like Sensi.AI, and they’re also developing their own AI solutions.

Take the Phoenix-based Devoted Guardians as an example. It has completely transformed its recruiting process through AI, ensuring applicants are always receiving timely responses from the company.

“The minute someone is engaging us on any of these platforms, we have an AI system that’s going to engage back — answer any question that they might have and really drive them to scheduling interviews — to really cut down on those ghosting problems that we’ve been all seeing over the last couple of years,” Devoted Guardians CEO Aaron Sinykin told HHCN earlier this year.

Home health providers have also come up with AI documentation tools like Apricot, which was launched by the home health CEO Trent Smith. Apricot can reduce documentation time for home health nurses by “up to 85%,” according to Smith.

“I just saw a solution to some problems that we had,” Smith said. “And I was fortunate to know people that could help me build it. We found a nail and then went and built a hammer for it, as opposed to building a hammer and looking for a nail.”

While many providers are now applying AI, they’re using it in a variety of ways. The support for Sensi.AI is just another example of the possibilities for the emerging technologies in both home care and home health care.

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Among the grant recipients is Phoenix-based Home Assist Health. The CVS Health Foundation has earmarked $2.1 million over three years between Home Assist Health, Valleywise Health and Advance.

“We are so grateful and honored,” Sara Wilson, president and CEO of Home Assist Health, told Home Health Care News. “It’s very humbling to have, what we see as these giants, wanting to partner with us, and recognizing the power that people have in improving the health and well-being of other people.”

Home Assist Health is a home-based care provider that provides a variety of care services, such as personal care, housekeeping and respite care.

The company has been working closely with Valleywise Health for the past few years, as part of a food pharmacy project that was partially funded by CVS. The project helped individuals who had an uncontrolled diabetic status, and who experienced food insecurity, get access to healthy diabetic compliant foods.

Last year, when Valleywise Health pursued the CVS grant, the health system invited Home Assist Health to be one of its partners for this endeavor.

“[Valleywise Health] invited us to be one of the partners to help focus on those social determinants of health, and put in place interventions from the home environment, and provide health coaching, education and navigation,” Wilson said.

The grant funding will go toward driving integrated diabetes management services. This includes things like home care and monitoring, as well as medically tailored food boxes and educational resources.

In other words, the funds allow the company to further build on the work it has been doing in this area. It will also empower individuals to take their health into their own hands, Wilson noted.

“At the end of the day, that patient we’re there to support is doing the work,” she said. “We’re not doing it for them. We’re giving them the information, the resources, the education, the accountability, so that they’re successful in their own health independence.”

As part of the collaboration, eligible patients that are referred to Home Assist Health through CVS Health Zone and Valleywise Health will receive a home visit from the company’s care staff. These patients will receive culturally aligned education and coaching, according to Wilson.

“For instance, if they’re primarily Spanish speaking, we’ll use their language and then we work with them to improve their health independence,” she said. “When we’ve done this in the past, we’ve seen their emergency department visits drop. They’re making proper use of their primary care doctors and specialty appointments. We reduce avoidable admissions, as well as readmissions, and then we see pretty consistent improvements in their health vitals labs and overall quality of life.”

Overall, Wilson believes that the awarded grant speaks to CVS’ enthusiasm when it comes to care in the home.

“What I understand is that CVS was very excited about the opportunity of bringing in a home care partner, where we can actually help address these issues from the home space,” she said. “That was something they were excited about doing here in Arizona. For us, it’s a wonderful opportunity to really demonstrate, with the spotlight of CVS, the power that home care has. There’s not been as much attention on how home care has these very real positive impacts on individual health and well-being.”

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As part of its business model, San Francisco-based Float helps patients receive care in their homes by contracting with registered nurses and scheduling shifts. The company was founded in 2021, and operates in California and Arizona.

One of Float’s key areas of focus as a company is addressing chronic illness, which impacts 133 million people in the U.S.

“After years in the emergency room treating patients with chronic conditions, and from treating my dad who suffers from one, I realized that moving specialty medicine into the home would be a sea change for everyone, ” Ryan Johnson, CEO of Float, said in a press release statement. “Expanding access to this type of care would have a huge impact on patient outcomes, not to mention the burnout of my nurse friends exhausted by long shifts and juggling priorities. Float has proven successful in doing exactly that.”

Float works with specialty pharmacies that send the company’s nursing staffing requests. The company’s clients include CVS Health’s (NYSE: CVS), Kroger (NYSE: KR), Option Care Health (NYSE: OPCH), Optum, Soleo Health, Walgreens Boots Alliance (Nasdaq: WBA) and more.

The funding round — which also saw participation from Wave Capital, Y Combinator, Burst Capital and Also Capital — is indicative of investors’ focus on health care companies that offer solutions and stretch care services beyond traditional institutions.

The participation from Wave Capital, Y Combinator, Burst Capital and Also Capital brought Float’s total funds to $15 million raised.

Additionally, the funding round saw individuals join as angel investors. This included Max Mullen, co-founder of Instacart, Jed Nachman, COO of Yelp (NYSE:YELP), and Brian Osborn, former vice president of marketing at Yelp and more.

Overall, Float has achieved 19,000 visits and has a staffing rate of 97%.

Broadly, Float patients get 22 visits, compared to the average home infusion patient who receives 13 visits a year, according to reports.

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This latest round of funding will help Axle Health beef up its software and machine learning engineering team.

Axle Health allows providers to arrange home-based care visits through its dashboard for communication and scheduling, specifically around coordinating appointments and routing clinicians to various homes.

As a company addressing one of home-based care’s biggest pain points, Axle Health is well-positioned to see growth. In fact, the company exceeded $1 million in annual recurring revenue during its first year. It was founded in 2020.

Axle Health’s funding comes at a time when home-based care providers have been vocal about the challenges they face when it comes to scheduling.

“[Scheduling] is one of the things that’s most inefficient in our business today,” Chris Gerard, CEO of TheKey, previously told Home Health Care News.

In general, scheduling challenges often create more issues for providers down the road.

Specifically, they tend to be a predictor for turnover in the home health space.

Nurses are 50% more likely to quit their positions if they dealt with high schedule volatility. Meanwhile, nurses are 40% less likely to quit if they dealt with low schedule volatility, according to a study conducted by University of Pennsylvania’s Population Aging Research Center.

In 2022, HHCN and AlayaCare conducted a survey which found that 20% of respondents identified inconsistent schedules as their agency’s top reason for turnover.

“It’s something we’re looking at across the organization,” The LTM Group CEO David Kerns previously told HHCN. “How much is that individual clinician’s schedule varying? Then we’re looking at it between clinicians. If you have one clinician who has 10 visits scheduled and another one who has 30 visits scheduled, that’s going to create that person — who probably is your most productive employee — to be upset and leave. Fixing that within their own schedules and within the team schedule, that’s a huge focus right now.”

As for Axle Health, the company is looking to integrate with as many EMRs as possible. The company also wants to incorporate AI scheduling and chatbot capabilities to its platform, according to reports from Axios.

Currently, Axle Health is integrated with Epic and Athenahealth.

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This latest round of funding will drive Carewell’s goal of streamlining access to home health products. As a company, Carewell aims to help family caregivers gain access to these products.

“We sell home health care products from brands that you know and trust,” Carewell CEO Bianca Padilla told Home Health Care News. “This includes incontinence, nutrition, mobility, wound care and more. The company was founded by caregivers for caregivers. Unlike any other retailer, we are incredibly engaged with our caregiving customers.”

The funds from this Series B round are earmarked for a few key areas, including Carewell’s growth strategy, the company’s e-commerce technology, and its efforts to improve overall customer experience.

Padilla noted that Carewell has raised this funding at a time when it has become increasingly more common for a senior’s loved ones to step in as an informal caregiver.

“There’s over 50 million people in the U.S. who do this,” she said. “Some are doing this alone. They’re afraid and it’s incredibly nerve-racking. It’s emotional, in nature, to care for your mom, your dad, your child. We’re able to offer that service that isn’t available anywhere else.”

While Padilla believes that growing in ecommerce can be difficult, she pointed out that the company has put together a strong team to set itself up for success.

In addition to Carewell’s funding announcement, the company also made several executive leadership appointments.

Mike Pacifico will join Carewell as chief financial officer, and Jason Klinghoffer has been named the company’s chief marketing officer. Pacifico and Klinghoffer previously held executive roles at Chewy.com.

Plus, Chewy.com alum Sam Rassner joins Carewell as chief technology officer, and Kelli Durkin joins as vice president of customer service.

“[Klinghoffer] was actually one of the first investors back in 2020, when we raised our original seed round of funding,” Padilla said. “He’s been an advisor to us ever since. As we were preparing to raise our Series B, we reconnected and I let him know we were looking for a CMO to help drive the business forward.”

After Klinghoffer, many former Chewy.com executives began to recognize the similarities between the two companies, and wanted the opportunity to help accelerate Carewell.

“We’re really leaning on their learnings, processes and experience to grow faster,” Padilla said.

Looking forward, Carewell sees the opportunity for continued growth.

“The overwhelming majority of Americans are planning to age at home, within their own communities,” Padilla said. “The demand for care is doubling. Carewell is offering that solution where you can find all the products, from childhood all the way through to end-of-life, and provide the right educational information and support.”

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The round was led by venture capital investor First Analysis, with participation from existing investors Osage Venture Partners and First Trust Capital Partners.

Dina also counts SCAN Group as one of its investors. The organization made a strategic investment in Dina in December.

As part of Dina’s business model, the company works with government-sponsored health plans, such as Medicare Advantage and Managed Medicaid.

“Our technology serves as a conduit between health plans, and their contracted provider and vendor network for everything from traditional post-acute care services like home health, hospice and DME, all the way through to non-medical services,” Ashish V. Shah, co-founder and CEO of Dina, told Home Health Care News. “Things like personal care, home modification, nutrition, things that you’re now finding covered under supplemental benefits for Medicare Advantage, or LTSS for managed Medicaid plans.”

Dina’s core users at these health plans are care coordinators whose job it is to match their members with provider services. The company’s platform allows these users to track how their members are progressing with these services, as a means to help meet cost and quality objectives.

Dina’s current business model is a shift from past iterations of the company.

“Our primary paying customer is the health plan, we’re no longer charging home-based providers directly, and that is something that we started to evolve away from,” Shah said. “We found that providers are already margin constrained. We really need to help prop them, support them and help them become more strategic partners. It was far easier for us to do that with a partner like SCAN or other types of health plan customers.”

Shah explained that, with its previous funding round, Dina’s goal was to prove that there was a business opportunity in serving government-sponsored health plans. Since then, the company has been able to build its client list.

During this time, Dina was also focused on making meaningful investments into its product operations and infrastructure with the funds from its previous funding round.

“With both of those things in place that really set us up for this series B [funding round], where we’re really going to look to build out our commercial function,” Shah said. “[We’ll] invest in our product, but also in sales and marketing that allows us to serve a growing Medicare Advantage and manage Medicaid space, or the intersection of the two around Special Needs Plans.”

Looking ahead, Dina has its eye on long-term growth.

“Around the time that we did our Series A, we were probably in roughly two to three states,” Shah said. “Now, we’re in 10, and are expecting to double our broader geographic presence here in the coming 12 to 24 months. We’ve grown a great deal, in terms of our market presence. I think unlocking visibility into the services and going deeper into interoperability and advanced analytics over the next 18-24 months — these are things that we’ll also put on our radar.”

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The Maryland-based company is now serving over 8,000 low-income patients in the Detroit area and aims to address the complex needs of those who often face significant barriers to accessing quality care.

“Most innovation in primary care in the U.S. has not addressed the needs of the most medically underserved patients and lower income Americans,” Dr. Rahul Rajkumar, CEO and founder of Accompany Health, told Home Health Care News. “We know that they have very unique challenges in their health care and it takes a very high and intense amount of effort to provide that care. It also takes an excellent team to provide that care. And that’s what we do.”

Accompany Health offers at-home virtual care and 24/7 support to its patients. It can act as a patient’s primary care provider, or can collaborate with existing ones.

The company deploys a team of health care professionals – from at-home clinicians and community health workers, to social workers and physicians – and offers that care to people who may otherwise not receive care.

The funding, Rajkumar said, will allow Accompany to hire, train and grow its staff of providers and team members. It will also help build technology to help bring a larger team onboard as the company focuses on the Detroit area.

“Our technology is built to serve an underserved population,” Rajkumar said. “We’ve spent a lot of resources in health information exchange so that our providers know our patients and are armed with information when they go and see them in the home.”

Rajkumar likes to think of Accompany Health as a “third generation primary care company.” Several of its leaders come from legacy companies in the health care and insurance world and are bringing that expertise along.

“Our team comes from these places and we’ve learned from the companies and providers that have come before us,” Rajkumar said. “We’ve learned about the care model, how to staff, how to train and also how to build the technology side the right way. That’s what we’re focused on doing right now: learning from all of the companies that have come before us and building a third generation version of this exceptional primary care model for an underserved population.”

For instance, Rajkumar himself was previously the COO of Optum Care Solutions, from 2020 to 2022. Board members Vivian Riefberg and Stephanie Lovell previously worked with Signify Health and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, respectively.

The funding round was led by a group of investors including Venrock, ARCH Venture Partners, IVP, Granite Capital Management and Evidenced.

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The investment was led by HealthQuest Capital. Existing investors – Flare Capital Partners and McKesson Ventures – also participated in this latest round of funding.

Inbound Health is an enablement platform that helps health systems and health plans develop hospital-at-home and SNF-at-home programs.

The company was originally part of the health system Allina Health. In 2022, the company spun off and became a separate entity. It launched with $20 million in funding from Flare Capital Partners.

Inbound Health CEO Dave Kerwar told Home Health Care News that there are three areas the new funds will be allocated toward. One of these areas is the company’s expansion into new markets.

“Some of the funding will capitalize us so that we can expand to those new markets and achieve the goals and the commitments we’ve made to those health system customers,” he said.

Over the course of the next six months, Inbound Health hopes to expand into two new markets, followed by a handful of additional markets throughout 2024.

The funds will also be earmarked for the continued development of Inbound Health’s clinical program.

“We’ve built a pretty impressive care model, to date, but there’s always opportunities to continue to be able to advance that by integrating new types of therapy, supply chains, care processes and people,” Kerwar said. “We’re going to be spending some time on the care model redesign, or care model advancement.”

The third area the new funds will go toward is the evolution of the company’s technology platform.

“We have deep analytics that are essentially learning models,” Kerwar said. “These analytics assist in the decisions that need to be made. They can assist a clinical liaison, for instance, or a nurse practitioner, when he or she is looking at a patient to identify opportunities, where they may be a good candidate for our care model, or not. We are continuing to invest on the analytic side, so that our staff can be operating as efficiently and as effectively as possible.”

Kerwar noted that while analytics is an additional tool that Inbound Health leverages to improve care, it’s not a substitute for actual clinicians.

“Those decisions are always 100% made by a licensed clinician, both on our side and the health system side,” he said. “We don’t look to analytics to replace any kind of a person, but they can help in the decision making.”

Garheng Kong, managing partner at HealthQuest Capital, believes that Inbound Health has carved out an indispensable role in the overall health care system.

“Inbound Health’s innovative solution addresses a pressing need within our health care system by enabling patients to receive high-quality care in the comfort of their homes, thereby enhancing the overall patient experience, and creating a solution that benefits all stakeholders,” he said in a statement. “This is especially vital in light of the growing capacity challenges faced by hospitals. We believe in the team’s ability to replicate and expand in future markets, making a substantial impact on health care delivery.”

Looking ahead, Kerwar sees limited barriers to growth for Inbound Health.

“We’re pleased with the amount of interest that I think all constituents — health systems, health plans, family members, regulators — have in this care model,” he said.

That said, the company is keeping an eye on the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) decision on the Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver.

“We’re looking forward to this type of the benefit, where advanced care can be delivered in the home, being part of a more permanent benefit structure that’s offered to Americans that are on fee-for-service Medicare,” Kerwar said.

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