CourMed founder and CEO Derrick Miles says his startup is about taking on “smart money.” Now, bootstrapped from the beginning, the company has taken on what he considers its first “institutional” funding.
The McKinney-based health care services delivery startup has landed a $500,000 interest-free, five-year loan from software giant Microsoft – the first investment from the company’s $50 million commitment last year to invest in Black-owned partner companies. And with the money, CourMed has the potential to scale globally.
“What we create with CourMed is concierge health care end-to-end. You get the physician, you get the PA, you get the nurse, you get the pharmacist, and you get CourMed’s tech,” Miles said. “Customers are already accustomed to paying for it, so when (employers) hear about the end-to-end solution, they'll jump right on board.”
The announcement comes after CourMed completed the 12-month Microsoft for Startups program, which included $85,000 work of in-kind support, at the beginning of the year. As part of the investment, CourMed’s services will be accessible to employers using Microsoft programs as a benefit offering. The money will also allow the company to bring its enterprise software within the Microsoft Marketplace, which Miles said would allow anyone across the globe to mimic CourMed’s services, splitting 80% of the revenue with the company and 20% to Microsoft via the Marketplace. That move is expected to take place within the next 60 to 90 days.
“Microsoft has always been an enterprise software company, and what we're doing with enterprise software, it's been a change the game,” Miles said. “That's why we believe this is a billion-dollar solution because you can be Kiev, Ukraine, download the software and do it.”
Since launching in 2018, Miles said the 11-person CourMed team has “figured some stuff out.” He said the company went from essentially a delivery company, with an independent pharmacy under McKesson, to an enterprise software and concierge service provider of several health care-related offerings. Some of its more recent verticals include a prescription savings card called the EnCOURage card, as well as a physician consultation service. The company has also begun offering monoclonal antibody tests and COVID-19 vaccines, something that Miles said was inspired by recent work Amazon Pharmacy and Google – the latter of which provided CourMed with $300,000 in funding through its Google for Startups Black Founders Fund after the CourMed was selected to join the Google for Startups Accelerator for Black Founders inaugural cohort.
“I realized that Google started off as a search engine. Amazon started off as an online bookseller. Microsoft started off as office productivity software. They saw an opportunity, and they blew up,” Miles said. “Basically, what they said to us is, ‘Hey, anything within the health care space, you guys should be expanding your verticals.’ And that's what we did.”
CourMed has been on a tear in recent months, aided by tailwinds from digital health care technology acceleration during the pandemic. Last summer, the company received grant funding from the McKinney Economic Development Corporation’s Innovation Fund to expand in the city and create 22 new tech jobs over the next two years. It has more than 300 drivers trained in medical privacy laws. Outside of North Texas, CourMed has operations in Florida, Arizona and California.
Earlier this year, Miles told the Dallas Business Journal CourMed saw 300% year-over-year revenue growth between 2019 and 2020 and was expecting to quintuple that this year. At the time, Miles said the company was likely to begin fundraising venture capital dollars. However, he said the company’s growth since then allowed it to turn down a $5 million term sheet that favored the investors over the founders.
“What we figured out is when we went from being just a delivery company to being a solutions company, we get paid because we’re part of the solution,” Miles said. “We've been able to help (providers) drive new revenue and lower their margins. We also learned these professionals who are going into homes and offices were doing everything manually. They had no technology to track what people were going inside. So, not only are they partners to us, but they're also customers because they're using our technology.”
CourMed was an NTX Inno Startup to Watch this year.
