Local startup lands $10M round, with help from St. Louis investors

Rezilient Heath founders are graduates of Cortex's Square One program.

St. Louis startup Rezilient Health has raised $10 million from a group of investors that includes a Florida venture capital firm and two of the region's most high-profile entrepreneurs.

Rezilient, which CEO Danish Nagda describes as a maker of technology that combines telehealth and in-clinic medical appointments for patients, said its Series A round was led by Winter Park, Florida-based Govo Venture Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm that targets health tech firms. Other investors include Jim McKelvey, a St. Louis native and co-founder of Block Inc.; David Karandish, former co-founder and CEO of Answers.com and current CEO and founder of St. Louis-based Capacity; Mark Jones, co-founder of Texas-based Goosehead Insurance; and Clint Jones, managing partner of Chicago-based Bridge Ventures.

"We have all these incredible operators, builders, founders who have invested, both in health care and outside health care," Nagda said in a phone interview. "They're betting on this company (in) St. Louis and building a new health care system for flyover country. It's really about how we build a new, tech-enabled health care system that works for everyone, not just the people on the coasts."

Rezilient, founded in 2016 and headquartered just north of Forest Park, aims to set up health care clinics in underserved markets — not for underserved people, per se. Health care in St. Louis, for instance, has competing health care organizations all operating in the region. That's not the case in a number of rural or smaller metropolitan areas.

"The idea here is that we have this opportunity where people have an access issue," Nagda said, tying the issue to longer periods of time spent waiting for care and difficulty getting appointments with specialists.

Rezilient aims to solve that with its infrastructure that live-streams doctors into an examination room, with medics using different scopes, probes and other tools in the room linked to the doctors who get the measurements and information in real time. Doctors can also see patients on patients' phones and computers at home.

Nagda said there are two types of care: virtual care and "analog" care that one gets in a hospital. The problem with virtual care is that an ear, nose and throat doctor seeing someone virtually lacks the ability to thoroughly inspect a patient.

Rezlient's clinic in Clayton opened two years ago, followed by another in St. Charles in 2022 and one in Stillwater, Oklahoma, on Sept. 1. Nagda said Rezilient began with primary care (primary care physicians work for the startup) and has subsequently built practices around specialty programs. A patient may come in to see a primary care physician, get referred to a specialist and have the subsequent appointment in the same room with Rezilient's interface.

"We've built this core infrastructure in-house that has allowed us to scale, in terms of the number of patients and scale in terms of scope of services without too much technological work, because the infrastructure was built correctly," Nagda said.

Nagda said Rezilient has 600 customers and 600% year-over-year growth. Oklahoma State University is a new client. Nagda said Rezilient earns money on value-based care contracts that tie payment to quality of care as well as through subscriptions.

"Year after year as we build clinic after clinic and serve customer after customer, each one of our locations will have more and more doctors, because they'll all be available at every location,” he said.

A 24-month expansion

Nagda said the success of the funding round demonstrates the quality of Rezilient's metrics, personnel and product.

"If you look at digital health funding, it's down a lot, like four quarters in a row," Nagda said. "But you can see the people joining our cap table: we've got top-tier and -grade investors with global leading bridge following and all these great investors."

He said Rezilient needs to expand its customer base, working with employers to sign up more patients through an increased sales force, as well as the startup's scope of services. He said the expansion timeline is 24 months.

"One of the biggest challenges that businesses and employers have is that they have point-solution fatigue. The average employer in America has five different digital health solutions for their employees. That means five different apps, five different experiences," Nagda said. "With Rezilient, you have one app and one experience, both in person and virtually. That integrated health care solution, expanding beyond just primary and urgent care now to all these different specialties, that's the second part of our goal."

"The world is changing; there's going to be people who are early adopters and people who are late adopters," Nagda said. "What we have shown now after two years and tens of thousands of patients is that the doctor-patient interaction is about the doctor's time and transparency. It's not specifically about the doctor touching you in person. Some people may value that, and they're typically people in the Medicare space above the age of 65 who may want that. They might want to have that experience, but our net promoter score is 90."

Net promoter scores range from -100 to 100 as a metric of how likely customers are to recommend a company to another person. In comparison, SSM Healthcare's is -26, BJC HealthCare's is -27 and Mercy Health's is -34.

"If it’s so great to have an in-person experience, people don't really like it," Nagda said. "We take care of people 65 and under, and the pandemic reset expectations for what that looked like. And the reason people don't like doctors on an iPad who can't even examine you is because they can't solve your problem. The key here is, what if you could see everything the doctor sees? What if you could hear everything the doctor hears? What if they could actually examine you, get labs on you, get imaging on you remotely and actually solve your problem?”