The pandemic shined a spotlight on inequities in the healthcare system, a system that is supposed to be free of unfair, avoidable, and remediable differences. In order to eliminate disparities between diverse groups, healthcare institutions are paying more attention to the delivery of care. Violet is a cultural competence credentialing and upskilling platform for healthcare practitioners. The platform focuses on eliminating the barriers at the clinician level to ensure that culturally-diverse patients are connected to the right providers and more clinicians are able to offer identity-care coordination in treatment. The programs offered are tailored to individual providers starting with an initial benchmarking assessment, allowing providers to identify gaps and upskill quickly to improve patient outcomes through varied formats like e-learning, actionable guides, audio diaries, and curated curriculums. 84% of clinicians using Violet reported increased inclusivity and there was a 3x improvement in retention from the industry standard with care provided by Violet-trained clinicians.
AlleyWatch caught up with Violet Founder and CEO Gaurang Choksi 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 closed our Seed round of $4.1M, bringing our total raised to date to $5.3M. Our lead investor for our Seed raise was SemperVirens, along with our other investors of The Venture Collective, Northwell Holdings, the venture arm of Northwell Health, Incite Ventures, and Naomi Allen, Founder and CEO of Brightline.
Tell us about the product or service that Violet offers.
Violet, founded in 2020, is the first-ever cultural competence credentialing and upskilling platform for clinicians, proving the power of inclusive care with improved patient health outcomes.
Violet’s created a proprietary framework that measures cultural competence in clinicians and uses that data to build personal pathways to upskill cultural competence and power identity-centered care coordination for patients.
What inspired the start of Violet?
I’m a gay man, an Indian immigrant, and someone who grew up on Medicaid. Throughout my life, I’ve seen how broken the health care system is for folks of culturally diverse identities. As a child, I played translator to my parents and often witnessed poorer care and discrimination. Working at Oscar Heath, I saw patients calling in asking for doctors that fit their identities, with no clear path to help fulfill those needs. Rather than siloing out identity-specific care, I feel it’s vitally important to provide access to all folks who need quality care.
How is Violet different?
Violet has created a definition and standard for cultural competence in clinicians. This has never been done before. As such, Violet’s data on clinicians allows for a democratization of identity-centered care.
What market does Violet target and how big is it?
Violet’s upskilling and credentialing platform is available to all care delivery organizations.
What’s your business model?
We monetize our upskilling platform to build provider ability and confidence in delivering inclusive care, and we also monetize our real-time provider skilling data to enable the health care industry to launch identity-centered care coordination.
How are you preparing for a potential economic recession?
We have runway for over 24 months currently. We’re ensuring that all investments we make are closely tied to return on investment — all of our employees are experienced with startup environments, therefore we know how to test, experiment, and fail fast to keep moving forward.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
We’re creating a new market for identity-centered care coordination, so it was challenging to size out our growth opportunities.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We hope to continue growing with digital health organizations as well as signing on more legacy hospital systems.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
I love going out to eat with friends, but I don’t have a favorite restaurant. Our leadership team did just do an outing at Shukette in Chelsea though — it was fantastic!
