H1 closes $100M Series C on the back of 'incredible traction' and a successful first use case

Fresh off of a $58 million Series B round, and just one year after graduating from Y combinator, H1, a “LinkedIn for the healthcare industry” has raised even more cash. On Tuesday, the company announced a $100 million Series C round.

The concept behind H1 is simple: It’s an increasingly rich database of medical expertise. The service hosts profiles for millions of physicians and can surface key figures in a given field by reviewing those profiles alongside scholarly publications or medical claims data. It can also provide insight into the patient groups each physician is likely to treat and an expert's openness to participating in clinical trials.

CEO and co-founder Ariel Katz describes H1 in even simpler terms:

“We’re providing a global platform for healthcare professional information, and everything you want to know about them. Everything you want to know about every doctor in the world,” he told TechCrunch.

The quest to compile “everything you want to know about every doctor in the world” has led H1 to attract an increasing amount of funding: about $71 million before this most recent round.

The $100 million series C round was led by new investor Altimeter Capital with participation from Goldman Sachs and Flex Capital. The round also includes participation from existing investors IVP, Menlo Ventures, Transformation Capital, Lux Capital and LeadEdge.

Katz chalks up the size of this round to growth in revenue over the past year — the company is reporting about a 250% increase in annual recurring revenue. The company has about 100 clients, says Katz, including top pharma companies like Novartis and AstraZeneca.

Pauline Yang, a partner at Altimeter Capital, said that the company is also starting to unlock use cases for all that data, which is one reason Altimeter was attracted to H1.

“The company saw incredible traction and growth with its first use case of helping pharma and life sciences identify key opinion leaders,” she told TechCrunch. “The use cases are extensive. It is a massive opportunity -- and I believe this is the right team with the vision and ambition to tackle it.”

What do pharma companies do with “everything you want to know about every doctor in the world?” This year, Katz says a H1’s value add for big pharma has been information on diversity in physician and patient populations that they’ve lacked in the past.

In 2020, the FDA took another step forward toward encouraging more diverse clinical trials by releasing a non-binding guidance document outlining ways to increase diversity in clinical trial participation.

“That made pharma companies go: What am I supposed to do?” Katz said. “They have no access to this information. So with our profiles of doctors all around the world, we let them know what patient population this person is seeing: You can understand if they’re actually going to recruit diverse patients to your clinical study.”

Becoming a hub for medical diversity data isn’t all that H1 has been up to. The nature of the data the company has collected has started to shift.

When Katz spoke to TechCrunch in 2020, the company wasn’t especially interested in user-generated data — rather they were focused on data that already existed. This year, however, the company has allowed physicians to start to “enhance” their own profiles.

About 10 million healthcare providers have profiles on H1, not all of them have actually claimed their profiles. In essence, their pages might come up in a search, but the people behind those pages haven’t contributed to the information on the page.

H1 doesn’t disclose data on how many of the 10 million healthcare practitioners have claimed their profiles, Katz said.

This year, though, physicians have been able to add to their own profiles. That might include indicating that they’re open for clinical trial work, for instance, or other details you might not otherwise find online. The shift, says Katz, is another way to address what he calls the “siloing” of medical information.

“You have information in your own head that’s not available publicly. And we believe for us to succeed you want the community to give us that information. It’s like Crunchbase,” he says.

And, in the long term, that user-generated data is one way the company might cement it's place in the medical professional ecosystem.

“Life science companies are hungry for data,” said Yang. “The H1 platform combines data from public, proprietary and private sources — which enables H1 to uniquely unlock value.”

Over the course of this round, H1 has plans to sell to more pharma and life sciences companies by doubling down on go-to-market efforts.