as big or even bigger than we had anticipated,” Margolis said.
Welltok is planning on rolling out major updates to CafeWell in 2015, and it will soon launch CafeWell Concierge. That product uses technology developed by IBM for the Watson supercomputer to make extremely specific on-demand recommendations. The product will use Watson to learn users’ activities, interests, and health status, and it will be powerful enough to identify nearby restaurants with healthy meals or places to exercise when a user is travelling.
With the new product launches, Welltok wanted to keep its focus on execution next year. “We had the opportunity here to raise capital and essentially go into 2015 with no distractions regarding capitalization, so we’ll be playing from a position of strength,” Margolis said.
While Margolis probably wouldn’t list them as distractions, Welltok has had a busy past year-and-a-half. Margolis became CEO in April 2013. Since then, Welltok raised two major investment rounds, bought startups Mindbloom and IncentOne to improve its mobile apps and incentive programs, and struck the partnership with IBM.
Along with Bessemer, Welltok’s investors include Emergence Capital Partners, InterWest Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Qualcomm Ventures, and IBM’s (NYSE: [[ticker:IBM]]) Watson Group.
Investors are betting big on Welltok in part because its executive team is filled with people who have experience building or managing major healthcare IT and insurance companies. Margolis has two multibillion-dollar healthcare IT companies under his belt, most notably the TriZetto Group, which he founded in 1997. Margolis led the company as it went public, before ultimately selling it to a private equity fund in 2008 for $1.4 billion.
