MedPilot lands $1.5 million from investors
MedPilot, a Cleveland software company that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to transform patient billing, moved to Cleveland from New York in 2018 to bring two of its founders back home, and to become part of Northeast Ohio’s growing health care technology sector.
Now, it’s heading to its own next stage of growth.
MedPilot announced this week that it raised $1.5 million in a funding round that closed last Friday, Feb. 7. Investors in this round are JumpStart Inc., Cleveland attorney Jon Pinney, North Coast Angel Fund and Valley Growth Ventures, as well as Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health of Los Angeles and Hudson River Capital Partners of New York. Specific terms of the investments were not disclosed.
Co-founder Matt Buder Shapiro, the company’s chief marketing officer, said the just-closed round brings MedPilot’s total funding to date to $3.6 million.
When the company moved to Cleveland, he said, it had five employees. By the end of last year, that number had reached 30, and it now stands at 40, Buder Shapiro said.
“The best decision we made was to come to Cleveland,” said Buder Shapiro, who grew up in Shaker Heights. Another co-founder, chief operating officer Nathan Spoden, is from Mentor, while the third co-founder, CEO Jacob Myers, is from California.
As a result of that growth, Buder Shapiro said, the company is in the process of moving to a larger space within its current building at 5500 S. Marginal Road in Cleveland. The move to the building’s top floor should take place within a month, he said, and will give MedPilot about 7,500 square feet, up from its current 5,000 square feet.
On its website, MedPilot says it uses “a combination of emails, texts, calls and statements to increase our chance of connecting with patients to resolve their balance” owed to health care providers. The company adds it uses a variety of methods “to personalize communication,” including patient demographics, bill size and age, and payment history.
“We track every action the patient takes on our communication, payment portal and help center to better inform our approach for re-engagement campaigns,” according to the website, which describes this as “a patient-forward approach of navigating people through their billing experience.”
The company says it already has helped navigate more than 1 million patients “through their financial experience.”
Rem Harris, senior partner, portfolio management, at JumpStart, said in an interview on Wednesday, Feb. 12, that the organization made its investment in MedPilot because the company has “a strong team with great expertise in the medical payment space” and an “awareness of (how to address) a big problem.”