Medical coworking startup Symbiosis LLC is nearly doubling the size of its D.C. headquarters as the appetite for its physician practice services intensifies.
The 4-year-old company, which runs a downtown medical office space for independent doctors and other providers at 1331 H St. NW, is taking over another suite in the building that could house an additional nine private practices — on top of its existing 10 tenants.
Specifically, the expansion adds nearly 2,500 square feet to its District footprint for a total of 5,800 square feet, according to Symbiosis CEO and co-founder Arun Mallikarjunan. The new suite is slated to open in early March.
“Our expansion is a direct result of oversubscription to our current footprint in downtown Washington,” Mallikarjunan said in a statement. “Our integrated approach to solving the barriers to entry for healthcare providers who want to open their own private healthcare practice has very strong traction.”
Symbiosis — a Washington Business Journal and DC Inno Startup to Watch of 2021 — provides turnkey space, scheduling, insurance and various services to outpatient clinicians, therapists and other providers, essentially handling operations so the medical providers can focus on patient care. Symbiosis provides its services through contracts that range from $500 to $5,000 per month depending on a client's needs.
The goal? To better position them to stay in business in an industry where an already increasing need for consolidation and affiliation has only amplified during the pandemic. That’s because financial challenges often go hand-in-hand with running a standalone practice in today’s competitive health care landscape.
But serving those tenant clients is just part of Symbiosis' business. The company has developed its own proprietary practice management software for everything from patient intake and treatment to billing and follow-up care. That idea came to fruition during 2020 but today sits higher on the priority list, Mallikarjunan said in an email.
The company has started offering that platform to a handful of practices. Short-term, it positions Symbiosis to grow faster and gives it a door to the larger health-care market beyond its own tenants, he said. Long-term, it could be spun out of the original company.
“If we don’t do this, then we also have to find individual software platforms that work for each of these providers” and pay for each of those, Mallikarjunan told us in September. “But if we provide that service in-house, I can then provide the economies of cost savings, because I’m providing the service also.”
Symbiosis $750,000 seed round is still open, now with “some momentum” with some commitments, Mallikarjunan told the Washington Business Journal via email. That will help fund this expansion and add another 5,000-square-foot location in Fairfax County that the company is working to finalize. It will also support new hires; the six-person company is looking to add four people to its development team and at least one more to its sales team, he said.
Mallikarjunan started Symbiosis in 2017 with his wife, Subha Nagasubramanian, who also runs her own physical therapy practice, Capitol Physical Therapy, out of their D.C. space. The husband-wife team invested $300,000 of their own money to get their venture off the ground and have funded it through revenue since 2019. The company projects $400,000 in revenue for 2021 — about twice what it took in for 2020.
