Dina — a digital network management company for home- and community-based services — recently closed a $7 million funding round.
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.”
Companies featured in this article:
