Payer-side health IT startup Zipari has raised $7 million in Series A equity financing. Vertical Venture Partners, which put an undisclosed amount of seed funding into Zipari in September 2014, led the round.
Zipari, based in Brooklyn, New York, will primarily use the proceeds to support increasing demand for its products and to build out the technology, according to CEO Mark Nathan. “We’re making sure we’re prepared for this growth,” he said.
“We estimate that one in four health plans is looking for a new CRM platform at any given time,” Nathan explained.
“These payers have been employer-focused for so many years that they didn’t really interact with consumers,” Nathan noted. Now, 80 percent of health insurers have some sort of customer experience program, but they often lack the technology to support it, he added.
Zipari supports customer relationship management in several ways. The company initially launched in mid-2015 with a customer experience platform for insurers adjusting to a more consumer-centric world, but has since diversified.
“A lot has changed since then.” Nathan said. “We have developed a customer experience ecosystem.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The core CX platform brings in customer information from different sources so call-center representatives do not have to log into multiple systems to get a full picture of each member’s history, Nathan explained. (One Zipari customer previously required reps to log into 14 different places, depending on what kind of information they needed, he said.)
The company now also has a product, InsureCX, that is built on top of Salesforce Sales Cloud. InsureCX includes pre-built workflows for member-service reps and adds predictive analytics and a rules engine.
Zipari also has introduced eight direct-to-consumer products. “Whatever the touch point is, we have a workflow,” Nathan said.
For now, the company is content on serving health insurers, but Nathan has longer-term goals of getting into the provider market, life sciences and property and casualty insurance, he said.
Photo: Getty Images
