It’s been a great month for the Indianapolis innovation community. Indiana’s capital city made the list of 20 municipal finalists vying to become the location of Amazon’s second headquarters, and a spate of local tech startups have hit new milestones.
One of those startups, Springbuk, announced last week that it has raised $20 million in a Series B financing round. The Bay Area’s HealthQuest Capital and Seattle’s Echo Health Ventures led the round, with contributions from St. Louis-based Lewis & Clark Ventures and Indianapolis-based Elevate Ventures.
Springbuk, a healthcare analytics company, was founded in 2015 to help businesses analyze employee health data to find ways to reduce health expenses.. Co-founder Phil Daniels says that when you think of health IT payers and providers, employers have the most to gain from a healthy workforce.
“We provide an employer-facing tool to allow better decisions on where and how much to spend on healthcare and target those dollars,” Daniels explains. Springbuk draws its data insights from medical claims, pharmacy claims, lab work data, and payroll data, he adds. “We take all that data, clean it, and put it in a predictive platform for future risks and the cost of that risk.”
For example, say an employee has diabetes and the treatment plan calls for prescribed medication. Springbuk’s software can tell if and when that employee gets off track with her treatment plan. Armed with Sprinbuk’s data analysis, the diabetes patient’s employer can encourage her to participate in a wellness program to inspire improvement before the situation snowballs
Daniels says the 60-person company plans to use its new capital to add 40 more employees by 2020, primarily in the areas of data operations and software development. To date, he says, Springbuk has analyzed more than $7 billion in health claims from more than 700 employers nationwide and identified over $250 million in potential cost savings.
“There are more than 600,000 lives represented on our platform,” Daniels says. “By 2020, we hope to have 1 million.”
Springbuk is “very excited” about its growth potential and its mission to prevent disease by harnessing the power of data. Although the company has discussed opening a satellite office outside of Indiana, Daniels says Springbuk is happy to stay in Indianapolis for the foreseeable future.
“We’re really bullish on Indianapolis,” he says, praising its healthcare systems and the growing presence of big tech players like Salesforce and Anthem. “It’s a great ecosystem for our talent pool.”
