A local startup is finding success in the booming digital healthcare technology industry.
McLean, Va.-based Verato, a provider of patient-matching technology, has raised $10 million in Series C funding.
The round was led by existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Alexandria, Va.-based Columbia Capital, with participation from Richmond, Va.-based Blue Heron Capital and California Health Care Foundation.
"This funding all about expanding," CEO Mark LaRow said. "We’re up to 40 customers – that puts us in a whole new ball game in terms of salespeople, engineers and customer service representatives."
And the hires have already begun. On Monday, Verato opened a subsidiary engineering office in Mexico with 11 new employees. That brings the company's headcount to 68, including nearly 50 at its McLean headquarters.
Founded in 2012, Verato sells a cloud-based matching platform that allows healthcare-related organizations match and link patient data to the correct individual.
The startup uses a self-learning database of U.S. identities as a reference, and says its cloud-based platform is less expensive and faster to implement than traditional matching technology. It's fighting a battle against duplicate records, which it says cause a third of claim denials. The process costs health systems $1.5 million annually on average, or roughly $2,000 per inpatient stay, according to the company.
The funding caps another year of significant growth for Verato, which acquired 20 new customers in 2018. With those additions, the startup's software is used by providers, health plans and information exchanges that manage over 100 million U.S. patients.
Among its customers are Northwell Health, Axia Women's Health, Health Solutions and Maryland-based Crisp, a regional health information exchange.
Columbia Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners teamed up for the startup’s previous two funding rounds, which each hauled in $12.5 million, putting its funding total at $35 million.
