A tremendous amount of potential innovation is stifled by the time, knowledge, and resources needed to develop products. This gap is amplified in industries that are heavily regulated like healthcare. Capable Health is a health tech infrastructure platform that lets healthcare companies bring digital health products to market faster and at less cost. According to the company, it takes 15+ months and a minimum of $500K to bring HIPAA-compliant mobile apps to the market. With Capable’s developer platform and associated API-based modules, digital health companies and healthcare providers can embed onboarding, signup, care delivery, tracking, and communications quickly without worrying about elongated development cycles coupled with onerous compliance reviews. Just as cloud hosting providers have developed specialized network solutions for HIPAA compliance, Capable Health offers the essential tech building blocks to allow healthcare companies to focus on providing patient-centric care without compromise.
AlleyWatch caught up with Capable Health founder and CEO Peter MacRobert to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised a $6M seed round led by M13 with participation from AlleyCorp and Able Partners.
Tell us about the product or service that Capable Health offers.
Capable has developed an industry-first software platform enabling providers to launch and scale their own fully HIPAA-compliant digital healthcare services for 80 percent less cost and time than it currently takes. Our one-stop platform enables any doctor to launch a virtual care clinic in days (not years).
What inspired the start of Capable Health?
As a South African-born entrepreneur, my first role in the U.S. was as the Chief Technology Officer of Candid. I led technology for the company, growing the team and building the tech stack from the ground up, and helping scale Candid into a nationally-recognized healthcare brand.
This experience surfaced for me a lot of the cracks in the infrastructure of the U.S. healthcare system, and I learned (often the hard way) the challenges of developing an engaging, patient-centric digital health experience.
On average, it takes around $500K and 15+ months to launch a HIPAA-compliant mobile app from scratch, pricing many providers out of the opportunity. Those who do get to market often find themselves spending substantial resources on building a myriad of integrations and complying with complex healthcare regulations — money that could have been used to build a more engaging experience with a better go-to-market plan.
That’s why I founded Capable Health: to democratize access to digital health infrastructure.
How is Capable Health different?
The Capable platform acts as an industry-first, one-stop orchestration platform for any healthcare provider to launch their own branded digital clinic, guiding their patients seamlessly through onboarding and sign up, delivering personalized care plans to keep patients on track with their health goals, and connecting patients and providers directly through messaging and video chat. This gives practitioners end-to-end visibility, data, and insights into their patients’ journey — from onboarding to discharge.
What market does Capable Health target and how big is it?
Short term, we’re focused on the rapidly growing number of early-stage, venture-backed U.S. digital health startups, which currently number an estimated 5,700 and growing. Our long-term vision is to be the Shopify for Digital Health, which is a massive $70B opportunity.
What’s your business model?
We are a SaaS business, charging a monthly platform fee and an active member per month fee. This covers the management and maintenance of a provider’s backend infrastructure, which will save their engineering and product teams a ton of time and money — so they can focus their energies on what matters to patients: the care journey.
What are your post-COVID office plans??
We’re building a distributed, remote-friendly team with offices in New York City (currently in Nomad) and Montréal. We also value in-person collaboration and touchpoints throughout the year, and have company-wide offsites (called Jamborees) bringing the team together.
What was the funding process like?
As a first-time founder, I discovered quickly that New York has a stellar and tight-knit startup ecosystem that’s very supportive of healthcare founders. Capable’s funding process ran smoothly with the expert guidance of our pre-seed investors, AlleyCorp and Able Partners, plus numerous healthcare operators in our network. We’re grateful that we saw a lot of interest (our seed round was oversubscribed!), and were able to close out the round quickly and get back to building the product and team.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
When fundraising, you’ll get told “no” a lot, as well as have your thinking teased apart in real-time. This can be frustrating at first, particularly if you feel the criticism is unfair or leveled by someone who doesn’t understand your industry deeply. If left unchecked, this can make you question yourself and your company, and distract you from your fundraising goals.
What I found helpful was to document the feedback, take the actionable insights to improve the pitch and the deck, and ignore the rest. This way, the good feedback helped me get stronger throughout the process; and by not dwelling on the unhelpful criticism, I didn’t lose sight of our vision.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
I think about traction from three perspectives: team, product, and sales.
When we went out to fundraise, we highlighted our ability to execute quickly and with excellence in these three areas:
(1) we had built a 20-person strong team of passionate experts with backgrounds in healthcare, fitness, SaaS and enterprise software, (2) launched our beta platform after only five months of development, and (3) had closed ten next-gen healthcare startups as customers in just three months — without a sales team and while fundraising!
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We have ambitious milestones to grow our team, product, and business so that it can support businesses of any size, ranging from practitioners using us as a self-serve tool to health plans using us to manage their relationship with members in Value-Based Care arrangements.
However, the metric that acts as our North Star is the number of monthly active members on the Capable platform. Currently, there are 46 million Americans unable to access the high-quality care they need. Our vision is a world where all of these people are accessing quality, empathetic care through services powered by Capable Health.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Listen to your early customers. When we launched our beta product, we brought on ten next-gen healthcare startups to pilot Capable. We worked closely with each of our customers to stand up their digital health experience on the Capable platform. We heard their struggles and feedback on our platform, what they liked and didn’t, and what other features they needed to build and scale their clinics. We took this feedback to improve our platform and iterate on our strategy.
Listen to your early customers. When we launched our beta product, we brought on ten next-gen healthcare startups to pilot Capable. We worked closely with each of our customers to stand up their digital health experience on the Capable platform. We heard their struggles and feedback on our platform, what they liked and didn’t, and what other features they needed to build and scale their clinics. We took this feedback to improve our platform and iterate on our strategy.
By listening to these customers, we made them happy. They became our evangelists, advocating and spreading the word for Capable to sales prospects, job candidates, and investors.
Each time you raise more money there will be the temptation to hire more, build more, and spend more. But the feedback of your earliest adopters will be the key to long-term success.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
In the near term, we’re focused on hiring for priority sales and engineering roles, to get the Capable platform in the hands of every healthcare startup in the country.
What’s your favorite outdoor dining restaurant in NYC?
Mother’s Ruin holds a sentimental place in my heart. When we started out building Capable, the New York team worked in Soho and that was our happy hour spot. The slushies and wings are fantastic.
