Inside Zoë Barry's new fintech startup

What do you do after exiting a startup that had successfully raised more than $40 million in funding? If you're anything like Boston serial entrepreneur Zoë Barry, who last year sold to Allscripts the drug-prescription startup she founded, ZappRx, you go on a 17-day hiking trip and focus on getting some rest.

She had planned to take an entire year off. She made it two months before filing the incorporation papers for her next startup.

"Once you get bitten by the startup bug, it's really hard to ever let that go," Barry, 35, said. "And two months of just rest and relaxation felt like eternity for me."

Barry is known to tech investors as the sole founder of ZappRx, a 45-person digital-health startup focusing on simplifying the management of the most expensive drugs, so-called specialty pharmaceuticals. Barry, who started the business in 2012 after a family member got sick, raised over $42 million from Qiming US Healthcare Fund, GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) and other investors before selling ZappRx to health IT company Allscripts (Nasdaq: MDRX) in June last year. The price tag was not disclosed, but people familiar with the deal said the price was less than the amount raised in venture capital.

Barry's new startup has its roots in her career before ZappRx, when she was working for hedge fund Dawson Capital on Wall Street. Like health care, her startup's new market — fintech — is also heavy regulated.

Barry declined to share much information about her new company, saying the company is going through a regulatory-review process, but she did answer a few questions. The new venture is named Zingeroo Inc. and has eight full-time employees. It will be a Boston-based business, she confirmed.

Last week, Zingeroo started the "Female Founders First" program by Barclays and Techstars, a six-week virtual program seeking to help 30 women entrepreneurs grow their businesses and address longstanding gender inequities in fundraising. "We are a tech company, so being part of Techstars is critical," Barry said. "We are a fintech company, specifically, so being part of Barclays ... there are potential partnership opportunities there."

A hint on the nature of the business comes from the company's name. As Barry explained, in her new "fintech play" there are a banter component and a social component. "The concept of zinger, which is sort of like a quick burst of energy or a funny comment, is ... like a banter component. I wanted to just name the company 'Zinger,' but that domain name was taken."

When asked about the meaning of the "Bulls vs. Bears" image on Zingeroo's website, Barry said things move up and down in fintech, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

"To pull away from that overall concept of fear of a bear market, versus opportunity on each side, up or down, you just have to be smart and figure out how to play ... and that helps with education and access and taking the fintech space from something that's really scary and intimidating and making it more accessible and approachable and enjoyable."

There are notoriously few consumer-focused social media companies in Boston, but the local fintech sector is robust, even through the pandemic. Nearly 1-in-10 fintech startups that launched in the U.S. last year was founded in the Bay State, according to a recent EY report.

Zingeroo was most recently based at GSVlabs, the downtown coworking space that shut down earlier this month, and is now in the process of building a distributed team. When Covid hit in March, the startup was a three-person business. Barry's first hire was Lindsey Judson, Barry's founder's associate at ZappRx who is now operations manager at Zingeroo, followed by Philip Picariello, a former head of investment management at Boston-based cryptocurrency research startup Flipside Crypto.

Zingeroo's current team, which in addition to eight full-time employees includes three advisors and three interns, is 50% women, as Barry noted. "I'm just really proud of the fact that I'm staying true to my roots and building a team that's diverse and has 50% women on it. That was something that I maintained at ZappRx," Barry said.