A Canadian company just raised $95 million — and some that cash is destined for Music City.
Health-tech firm League is opening a physical office in Nashville, Chief Marketing Officer Colin Bettam said, with plans to employ as many as 30 people by the end of the year, eventually growing its local headcount to more than 50 workers.
League is looking for office space “as quickly as possible,” in hopes of opening the doors in the second quarter, Bettam said.
League’s interest in Middle Tennessee is another example of the Nashville health care industry’s pull on startups and health-tech companies looking for knowledgeable talent. For example, health-tech startup Darvis moved its headquarters to Nashville in June, after participating in the Nashville Entrepreneur Center’s Project Healthcare program.
Bettam said League was looking for a second U.S. city to open an office, when in 2019 he made a trip to Nashville — drawn by the city’s music industry, not its health care chops. After spending the week meeting with singers and songwriters, he came away impressed.
“I had never been to Nashville before. I’m a wanna be musician and I came down for a visit and I was just mesmerized by the city,” Bettam said. “One of the things I did not know before I got here, was that actually health care is the No. 1 industry in the city. I went back and sat down with the partners and said, ‘I think I’ve got an idea of where [office] No. 2 should be.”’
League’s platform allows health care providers, health insurance companies, retail pharmacies and employers to build custom health care applications for consumers. The platform uses data from electronic health records, insurance claims and health and wellness devices to create personalized experiences, while enabling systems to share data.
Founded in 2014, League employs more than 600 people across its Toronto and Chicago offices.
That growth has been fueled by the health care industry’s mad-dash to catch its technology offerings up with consumer expectations, Andy Harlen, League's head of platform partnerships, said.
“Every single organization in the country is in one of three categories: They are planning to go through a digital transformation, they are actively going through a digital transformations, or they’re somewhat done with the digital transformation and it’s either working to it’s not,” Harlen said. “Personalization is incredibly hard … being able to do that in real time and in an automative way using machine learning and [artificial intelligence] is just not something that’s a core competency of health care. They are really leaning on us to be that infrastructure layer.”
League hired its first Nashville employee in the fall of 2020 and now has 10 people working out of the Midtown WeWork location.
That number is about to jump, however, as League announced a $95 million capital raise earlier this month, led by TDM Growth Partners.
Bettam said the company will use the funds to continue building the platform (League already invested approximately $100 million into its technology), hire across all departments in each of its offices and to keep up with customer demand.
In Nashville, League currently has open positions in sales, marketing and business development.
“I keep telling our CEO to get the checkbook ready, because we’re going to grow [in Nashville],” Bettam said.
