Boston-based ZappRx, Inc. announced today that it has closed $25 million in Series B funding led by Qiming US Healthcare Fund, a venture capital firm based in Seattle.
The Series B included participation from SR One, who led ZappRx’s Series A in 2014, and GV (formerly Google Ventures). As part of the financing, Mark McDade, Managing Partner at Qiming US, will join ZappRx’s Board of Directors.
ZappRx, which stands for "Zoe's Prescription App," is a digital health company that Zoë Barry founded following what happened to her youngest brother, who was diagnosed with severe epilepsy at age 5.
“He went from a healthy, active child to developing a stutter, short-term memory loss and ultimately at risk for seizures so severe that he would have had permanent brain damage,” founder and CEO Barry said.
It took nine months for his brother to be diagnosed and six months to get him therapy. So the patients’ perspective in getting timely help was something that Barry had very much in mind when she founded ZappRx.
The goal for ZappRx is expediting the specialty drug prescribing process thanks to an online platform shared by patients and medical centers. ZappRx works only for specialty drugs, which are medications treating a chronic, complex or progressive and terminal disease. Usually, specialty drugs are quite expensive. “The average price of a specialty drug is $100,000 per patient, per therapy, per year,” Barry said.
Let’s say, for example, that you show symptoms of a rare form of pulmonary hypertension. What happens next is a long, multiple-step process. Getting an appointment with a specialist may take several months. Also, you often have to take a lab test to prove that you’re eligible to be prescribed a specialty drug.
“If you are working with a physician that does not use ZappRx, they would manually filling out the paperwork to advocate for you, to prove that you have this disease,” Barry said. Think about 20 or 30 pages of supporting materials to be sent to a specialty pharmacy. Then, patients have to wait about 6 or 8 weeks to get the drug approved. The only thing they can do in the meantime is call the doctor or the pharmacy to check on the status of their prescriptions.
While using the ZappRx app, patients can track their drug like an Amazon package. The cloud-based platform streamlines the process into a single digitally-enabled format.
ZappRx, which is available nationwide for pulmonary diseases, also has a feature that helps doctors manage the prescription process regardless of the patient’s health insurance. Data are always aggregated and anonymous, Barry said.
According to Barry, the Series B will be focused more on the commercial, sales and marketing side of the company, while the Series A was more centered on building the tech team. Specifically, the Series B funding will be used to build out the commercial team and the business development team.
Today, the company has 27 employees. “We’re going to double in size, actually more than double in size, by the end of the year,” Barry said.
Barry added that the company will hire on its implementation and its product management team in Boston.
(Photo courtesy of ZappRx)
