This Startup Raised $100 Million In Bid To Power All Doctor Information On The Internet

There are around 15 million doctors in the world and Ariel Katz can tell you incredibly detailed information about 10 million of them, including their specialties, ongoing research, published papers, clinical trials, insurance claims and social media mentions. With the New York-based startup H1, Katz and cofounder Ian Sax, have scraped and distilled disparate global healthcare data into a LinkedIn-like interface to help biopharma companies figure out the best doctor to involve in a clinical trial or educate about a new therapy. “H1 is a global platform of every healthcare professional in the world and everything you want to know about them” says CEO Katz, 28. 

Currently used by companies including Novartis and AstraZeneca, Katz has much bigger ambitions to expand well beyond the life sciences industry and eventually provide this data to hospitals, health insurers, startups and patients. In the next decade, he says, “any place on the internet where you see doctor information, it’s going to be powered by H1.” 

Given the speed at which H1 is raising capital, investors agree. On Tuesday, the three-year-old company announced a $100 million Series C led by the technology-focused crossover firm Altimeter Capital. Goldman Sachs and Flex Capital also participated in the round, along with existing investors IVP, Menlo Ventures, Transformation Capital, Lux Capital, and LeadEdge. It comes less than a year after H1 raised $71 million over the course of 2020. This latest investment brings H1’s valuation to $750 million, according to a person familiar with the deal. 

The healthcare industry “lacks a single source of truth on healthcare professionals,” says Pauline Yang, a partner at Altimeter Capital. “The pandemic was a sort of wake up call to them that they aren’t operating efficiently. They need to operationalize and use software to do their job better,” she says. “I think H1 was on the right side of history from that perspective.”

Katz and Sax also started building and raising money at the right time. When H1 entered the startup accelerator Y Combinator in January 2020, the bootstrapped company had 10 employees in the U.S. The pitch was PitchBook meets Crunchbase (the two big compilers of private company and venture capital data) but with doctor data. H1 started by scraping public sources, like hospital websites, clinicaltrials.gov and state medical registries. The Affordable Care Act had opened up access to more Medicare and Medicaid claims data and also pharma payments to doctors. H1 also purchased private data sets from health insurers and other sources. 

It was during Y Combinator that Katz and Sax decided to not just focus on U.S. market data, but to go global, closing a Series A two weeks before the pandemic lockdown. The status quo for pharma companies had long been to call up a consulting firm and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a spreadsheet listing the top doctors studying a certain disease. With H1 they could buy a software license to a comprehensive global directory with an easy-to-use interface. “It started to spread like wildfire,” says Katz. “And in every conversation, there was nothing else out there like it.” 

Katz has been wrangling healthcare data for almost a decade. He started his first company during his junior year in college at Binghamton University. At the time, he was considering pursuing a PhD in neuroscience, as he researched the question: “Do people with schizophrenia have the same consciousness as you and me?” But he soon found there wasn’t any centralized database for undergrads to figure out which programs were accepting PhD students. Katz and some friends built a tool to scrape research activity on university websites and created profiles for academics to help students match with different research programs. In 2016, the company Research Connection was acquired by the Jefferson Accelerator Fund, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Ewing Kauffman Foundation for an undisclosed sum. 

After the sale, Katz started planning a 6-month trip to India and through a mutual friend was introduced to Sax, who had moved to India in the late 1980s to build out the financial data business at Capital IQ. Sax, who was now living in New York, had spent more than two decades understanding how to collect and analyze huge troves of data for the financial services industry. In 2018, the duo decided to launch H1 to bring big data to the healthcare industry. The name is derived from “the statistical representation of a true hypothesis” in scientific research, says Katz. If  an experiment has shown to be a new discovery, the hypothesis is H1 (versus H0, which is null). 

“We both are deeply involved at the strategic level,” says Katz, but on the day-to-day “it’s really divide and conquer.” Sax oversees the data platform, while Katz handles the other aspects of the business, including sales, marketing and finance. Since 2020, the company headcount in the U.S. has grown from 10 to 188 people, along with hundreds of international employees (Katz declined to provide the specific numbers). Today H1 includes information on 160 million peer-reviewed publications, 350,000 clinical trials and $8 billion in medical claims, among many other data points. 

With the funding, H1 plans to continue growing its global doctor network. While the platform includes doctors from “every country in the world and continent,” says Katz, the company is looking to expand in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Part of the issue is that in some countries there are very few websites to scrape doctor information from, says Katz, citing the island nation of Madagascar as an example. H1 is also growing its network of “claimed profiles,” meaning where the doctor is actively engaged in updating the information. The company has more than 100 clients and earlier this year acquired Carevoyance to expand its customer reach into the medical device market. Katz says annual recurring revenue has increased 250% year-over-year, but declined to give specific revenue numbers. 

H1 has also been able to build out new product features in response to market changes, like when the FDA released new guidance to enhance the diversity of clinical trial populations in November of last year. The company quickly spun up features using Medicare, Medicaid and other data sources to provide demographic information about the patients an individual doctor sees. “There’s nothing else out there to solve it, because it’s a really hard data problem to pull this all together,” says Katz. “This is honestly the proudest I’ve been in my career. It directly impacts the patient, it’s good for society and it’s more inclusive medicine.” 

When Katz talks about the future of the company, he isn’t just looking a few years ahead, but a decade on, which is when he hopes that patients, health insurers and other startups will all be using H1 to find the best doctors. “There’s a lot of old fashioned broken stuff with the [healthcare] system. But the people within the system are not the system,” he says. “They’re really hungry and thirsty for something new to help them operate in a smarter way.”