Virtual care services provider KeyCare adds $3M to its Series A funding

This new funding brings the total round up to $27 million

KeyCare is a company on a mission to ensure that health systems can provide patients with a more consistent, higher quality experience; it does this by providing them with virtual care services, allowing health systems to augment their care teams and optimize capacity by partnering with a nationwide network of virtual care groups.

The company, which built its platform with Epic, raised a $24 million Series A round in August of 2022, and on Thursday it announced a $3 million extension, bringing the total round to $27 million.

The new funding came from Ziegler and two additional health systems; they join previous Series A investors 8VC, LRV Health, Bold Capital, and Spectrum Health Ventures.

Since its initial fundraising last year, Keycare has gone live with its inaugural partner, CoreWellHealth, and has now have provided care to patients in over 35 states across the country. It also expanded its team, and is now preparing to go live with at least four more health systems in the first quarter of this year.

"We saw high demand for our offerings, and knew that extra capital made sense to help make sure we could meet that demand. At the same time, we had amazingly strong interest in the market from both investors and health system partners to be involved in what we are building," said Lyle Berkowitz, MD, CEO of KeyCare.

In addition to the services it provides to health systems, Keycare also allows patients to schedule appointments with a variety of Virtualists via their own health system's MyChart portal or call center. The Virtualists then complete the encounter on KeyCare’s Epic platform; the patient's data is made available to the Virtualists, and their virtual care notes are sent back into the health system’s EHR.

The company, which launched in July of last year, believes that the ability for the Virtualists to have access to the patient’s health system record helps improve the quality of care, and vice-versa, as the health system is notified their patients was seen and gets a structured note and any medication changes sent into their system as well.  

This new funding will help Keycare meet its partner demand and expand into new product offerings: it plans to add pediatric coverage and also bring a behavioral health and virtual primary care offering to market in the first quarter of this year, while also expanding a variety of technical functionality and billing options on its platform. It also anticipates adding multiple new health system and Virtualist partners during the first and second quarter.

It will also be further expanding its time, hiring across technology, product, client success and practice operations.

The fact that the company was able to raise this additional capital, even as it has become more difficult for companies to get funding, "helps reaffirm we have a strong vision, clear product-market fit and momentum in a very hot area, as well as an amazing team that can help execute on this vision," Berkowitz said.

"It also reinforces our belief that health systems can and should expand their digital front doors by partnering with Virtualist groups that are working on an Epic-based platform."

(Image source: keycare.org)