Healthcare integrations solution Bridge Connector raises $25.5M

The company saw revenue growth of 1000% in 2019, and expects to see 800% this year

Healthcare is so big and so sprawling, it's perhaps not surprising that there are massive inefficiencies in how it operates. For example, the average hospital uses roughly 16 disparate electronic health records platforms right now, which means that data sharing is difficult even within that one hospital, let alone when they need to share with others.

Bridge Connector is solving that by offering an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) platform. It delivers integration solutions for healthcare organizations, helping them automatically transfer data between disparate systems. 

On Tuesday, the company announced it raised $25.5 million in a Series B round led by Axioma Ventures. All of the company's existing investors participated, including Jeff Vinick, bringing the company's total funding to over $45 million.

Bridge Connector last raised a $5 million round in December, and since then it has "shifted into a larger enterprise strategy," David Wenger, the company's founder and CEO, told in an interview. 

Whereas the company used to sell into organizations such as nursing homes, post-acute care facilities, addiction treatment and behavioral health facilities and hospitals, it now sells its solution directly to mid-market digital health companies, who are selling their product to a provider or payer or pharma company.

"They need an interoperability layer between their product and the system of record which, in most situations, is an EHR that needs to function as one," Wenger explained. "We let them focus on their own technology, rather than focusing on how to integrate it with a system of record."

Bridge Connector is an app partner with Salesforce, in which it works closely with the company's clients, helping them to integrate Salesforce with whatever other systems they are using. That relationship, he said, is what prompted the company to make this larger shift.

"If you think about Salesforce, and what we were able to help them do from a scaling and integration strategy, now we're swimming with even larger fish up market in the enterprise and publicly traded companies space, to where we're doing the same thing we did for Salesforce for them," Wenger said.

"If they have 10 customers with a similar use case, we can take them live extremely quickly, which allows them to have locked-in pricing, it allows them to have transparency. They're not stuck within the walls of what a data model allows for from an API connectivity standpoint. They're enabled by our library of connectors and largely by our use case-based approach to solving healthcare inoperability."

Earlier this year, the company partnered with Skedulo, a company that provides healthcare organizations with a scheduling engine to simplify complex health care schedules. It also collaborates with Epic and Allscripts.

Bridge Connector saw over 1,000 percent year-over-year growth in 2019, and expects to see 800 percent growth this year; partially that has to do with the COVID pandemic, which has  made Bridge's technology even more important to its clients during over the last few months. 

"The need for our solution has been exacerbated by the quickness in which people need access to data. Pre-COVID, there was a barrier to entry there, but it was essentially removed overnight. So, the floodgates have opened, and we're signing deal after deal of everybody with the same pain point," Wenger told me. 

"We've been very lucky: instead of these companies going and hiring internal engineering teams to build integrations, they can dedicate the revenue or the budget that they have allocated, instead of going in hiring 30 engineers to build an integration, they can use a product that all we do is healthcare integration. And that's what we specialize in. So, the value prop at Bridge has never been stronger."

The company plans to use the new funding, in part, to continue to grow of Destinations, its no-code platform that it unveiled in October. With Destinations, Bridge Connector is able to push features and functionalities updates, meaning that, as APIs change, the company is able to repush those updates out to its entire customer base at the same time. It also provides full client reporting, dashboards and transaction volumes, so that customers can see the value Bridge Connector is providing to their business.

"We’ll be continuing to innovate destinations because our model is to deliver the integrations for our customers. We use Destinations to build, manage and maintain those integrations that our customers buy from us. Eventually, once we hit a certain critical mass, we will push out Destinations to the broader public. And that's what the money is going towards," said Wenger.

Bridge Connector also plans to push out new products, as well go into new verticals, including telehealth, while also continuing to build out its team. The company has already hired 40 new employees this year, and will continue hiring through the end of the year. 

"This company is 165 people now, of which we have some of the best talent in the country and some of the best brightest minds in healthcare integration. You don't go through a funding round like we just did without every single member of the team chipping in and doing their jobs and holding themselves accountable to the end goal," Wenger told me. 

The company's goal, he said, is to capture as much in the market as possible, as quickly as possible.

"We're going to do that by focusing on a top notch customer experience, as how we treat our partners, and how we scale those partnerships. What’s next for Bridge is we're continuing on this trajectory, and you'll see us continue to double down on new products, on people, and obviously the technology that we've created," he said.

"We think that the problem we're trying to solve is big enough, and if we stay focused on our mission and our vision then we are well on our way to helping solve healthcare operability."