H1 Insights raises $12.9 million to become LinkedIn for healthcare

H1 connects over 8 million healthcare professions to 16,000 institutions

LinkedIn is, of course, the go-to network for professional networking, but the reality is that, for specific industries, the site still leaves something to be desired. Take healthcare, for example, where medical affairs and marketing professionals at healthcare organizations and pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device companies need to be able to identify and connect with the most relevant healthcare professionals. 

The information that's currently available to them simply isn't adequate to meet their needs, said Ariel Katz, co-founder and CEO of H1 Insights, a network dedicated to connecting healthcare professionals and companies.

"Linkedin just says where the doctor works and went to school. That’s not interesting. Don’t you also want to know about the types of patients that doctor is seeing or what research they are doing? With H1 you get all that information in one location kept up to date for you," he said.

Essentially, the goal for H1 is to be the "Linkedin for healthcare," said Katz, and the company just received an infusion of cash that will help it get there: on Wednesday, H1 announced that it raised it first institutional funding round, a $12.9 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures.

Novartis dRx, Y Combinator, Baron Davis Enterprises, ClearPoint Investment Partners, Jeff Hammerbacher, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Underscore VC also participating, bringing the company's total funding to $13.5 million; H1 previously raised funding when it graduated from Y Combinator. 

Founded in 2017, H1 now has over 8 million HCP profiles in 16,000 institutions in 70-plus countries. Its clients, which encompass over 35 pharmaceutical companies, including seven of the top 10, use the platform to do things like find doctors to work on a clinical trial for a given biotech, find hospitals where they can do their clinical and "find the thought leading healthcare professional to lead a CME session," said Katz.

"Pharma, biotech, and med device companies have no way of knowing which healthcare professionals to work with and keep up to date with the latest scholarly and clinical work. H1 solves this for them by building the largest platform of healthcare professional profiles and data. It brings it all together to one place." 

H1, which saw its revenue grew 350 percent year-to-year in 2019, will use the capital to grow its existing team, which currently consists of 35 employees, adding people in sales, customer success and engineering. It will also be used to expand H1 into additional market segments.

"We're growing very fast and have been adding members to our team almost weekly over the past couple of months. We don't have a set number of hires in mind, but our intention is to hire as many as needed to maintain the companies incredible growth rate and high quality of service. So whatever that will take is what we will do," said Katz. 

Along with the funding, it was revealed that Greg Yap, partner at Menlo Ventures, will be joining the board of directors at H1.

"Culture derives from the founders, and H1 co-founders Ariel Katz and Ian Sax have each spent their entire career in data analytics and curation. Ariel has founded multiple data analytics companies focused on customers in healthcare and science. Ian has scaled up data acquisition and curation pipelines serving multiple industries. We love their experience and laser-sharp focus on solving customers’ unmet critical needs," Yap wrote in a post on Medium.

"Greg has led multiple biotechs and large business units at big pharma. His domain experience and operating experience bring a new leader to help with key company decisions," Katz told me.