A Tampa healthtech startup has exited from stealth mode with 50 employees, national partnerships and funding plans.
It's to be expected of Saru Seshadri, a local serial entrepreneur that also served as the former COO for the Florida-Israel Business Accelerator.
"I have a lot of battle scars but working with FIBA, the startup ecosystem and creating a constellation force is far different than previous companies [I've built]," Seshadri said. "Definitely, there is a modern outlook to starting the company — you have the legacy experiences from building the organizations from scratch, and it gives me a lot of experience of now knowing what not to do."
He founded Constellation4Health in 2019 and officially launched the project in April 2020. It offers a data and subscription platform which insurance companies can utilize to clean and manage the data of health care providers. Constellation4Health is a Salesforce partner and now that it is officially out of stealth mode, plans to work with Aflac for national expansion.
"The system is horrendous; in many cases it's manual, the data is not clean and once it's put in the system, it's not kept clean," Seshadri said. "The shirt I'm wearing has better data than the doctors' system."
Seshadri has roughly 50 employees with "significant revenue already" and more on the books for 2022, he said. Part of the employee lineup is Rich Heruska, who serves as VP of marketing & strategic alliances. He previously spent years as the director of the Tampa Bay Wave's accelerator programs. Both men have worked with TiE Tampa Bay and had a connection through Constellation4Health's interim COO Suhas Apte.
"Both he and I have worked in the ecosystem and had successful ventures," Heruska said. "One of our biggest opportunities is the talent side; we have our customers, but hiring those with our core values will be a major opportunity to leverage our core network."
Heruska left the Wave in February 2020 and worked as a consultant before landing with Seshadri last fall.
"I was looking for a new challenge and after being able to bring solutions to many other industries, health care is ripe for innovation," he said, adding he plans to form partnerships with local universities and just finished representing the company in the Salesforce accelerator program.
The company is entirely bootstrapped but seeking a seed round from strategic investors for an undisclosed amount. It's also looking to solidify its leadership team, expecting to hire a chief revenue officer and chief technology officer in the near future. It does have a physical office in Carrollwood, but the team is currently entirely remote.
"The timing and opportunity with this space are right," Seshadri said. "We're hoping to disrupt the health care space; we’ll be forming partnerships, strategic investments, things that wouldn't happen 10 years ago will happen now, as long as the mission is happening."
