One of the earliest companies in the Drive Capital LLC portfolio enters 2022 with $58 million in fresh venture funding and a new brand.
Enlace Health is the new identity of Aver Inc., which drive moved to Columbus from Wisconsin in 2014 to continue its quest to bring about the long-awaited shift in healthcare to a payment system that rewards better outcomes instead of doing more stuff.
Cox Enterprises led a more than $58 million round in November, a return investment following a $27 million round in January 2020. The Atlanta-based company's VC arm has several healthcare companies in its portfolio. The round could expand to as much as $75 million, Enlace reported in a Dec. 15 regulatory filing.
As Aver, the company started by using data analytics to build "bundled" payments for a complete care scenario, such as a pregnancy through birth, instead of separate ad hoc charges for every visit or in-hospital diapers. As Enlace, it's expanding focus to build a network between insurers, healthcare provider and patient.
In mid-November Enlace entered a partnership with Wildflower Health, a San Francisco-area mobile health platform for maternal health, to provide the data analytics behind a health plan and app to coordinate care and detect risks for mother and baby from prenatal through postnatal care.
"This new investment is a great moment for our company and signals the aggressive expansion of our mission: The evolution of healthcare from its chaotic environment to an orderly infrastructure that enables true, quality-driven healthcare to be paid for and consumed economically and efficiently for all participants," Enlace CEO Bill Nordmark said in a news release.
The round caps a record $1.4 billion in venture capital raised by Central Ohio technology companies in 2021, nearly $1 billion of that to local businesses in the Drive portfolio.
